Winning at #science With Twitter

Tonight on the arXiv, you can read the new preprint from Bob McNees, myself, and Nico Yunes, entitled Extremal Black Holes in Dynamical Chern-Simons Gravity. So, what’s special about this paper? If you read the acknowledgments you’ll find something interesting: You can trace the origin of this paper to these tweets from July 2014:

@duetosymmetry Funny — I was looking for identities to compare my results to eqns 8 & 9 in your recent paper! @mandaYoho

— Robert McNees (@mcnees) July 7, 2014

@mcnees Really! You mean http://t.co/BQkAGTqept? Glad to see more than 3 people are interested. Email me if you have any Qs.

— Leo C. Stein (@duetosymmetry) July 7, 2014

@duetosymmetry Nico posed the problem/got me interested. We should all coordinate.

— Robert McNees (@mcnees) July 7, 2014

And that’s all it takes to start a scientific collaboration with social media! Here’s a concrete example of Twitter being useful in academia, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.