Twitter is suddenly getting a lot of attention, thanks to a number of punts in the media by various celebrities. However, Twitter is not just celebrities subverting a pop culture phenomenon for marketing gain, or a zillion vacuous comments by teenagers with too much time on their hands. Surprisingly, Twitter is becoming useful.
Think of it this way: in the early days of the Internet there were relatively few websites about the things you wanted to know about – news, opinions, articles and so on – so it was possible to visit a few websites one after another, and many people still do that. With the explosion of content a few years ago – especially audio, images, and video – it took the elegant simplicity of RSS to sort all that information into a few feeds you could put into one reader or homepage.
But sometimes you want to hear ‘what’s going on’, rather than having full-blown articles, or you want to be forwarded articles that are relevant to you. This is where Twitter comes in, and people have been using the service in this way for personal information since it was launched three years ago. An increasingly, people are using to stay updated in technical fields. Think of Twitter as a continuous RSS of little bits of extra information: it’s a bit like overhearing someone’s conversation, which sometimes it actually is.
I work on particle accelerators and on new methods of generating nuclear power, so of course I’m interested in these areas. Here’s my round-up of nuclear and physics-related Twitter feeds, possibly UK-biased. I’ve tried to just include the ones that give genuinely useful information, whilst not bombarding you with thousands of updates that dilute all the others (like, say, the BBC News does).
General and Particle Physics:
- Institute of Physics
- The John Adams Institute
- AIP Publishing
- Argonne National Lab
- Brian Cox
- Brookhaven National Lab
- CERN
- DIAMOND Light Source
- Lord Drayson (UK Science Minister)
- Fermilab Today
- Roger Highfield (at New Scientist)
- KEK
- National Physical Laboratory
- Research Fortnight
- The Royal Society
- SLAC
- Tevatron
Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Energy:
