Richard P. Grant started a nice meme via his nature blog asking Twitter users to summarise their peer-reviewed scientific papers in 133 or fewer characters and to tag it #sci140 (7 characters). There have been some super examples, but never one to shy away from bucking a trend, I thought I’d go all historic and pitched in with the following:

Archi, you’ve just had a bath, get some clothes on before you catch your death of cold, are you dense, or what?

Professor, these X-ray patterns are incredibly symmetrical, best not mention them to Jim and Francis

Stanley, is this circuit really 450 Volts, those people look like they’re in real pain? Shut up and just push the lever

Fido, get down, you’re slobbering all over my good lab coat…it’s only the doorbell

I’m sorry Alex, I forgot to put your Petri dishes away and now they’ve got all mouldy…hang on…

Brother Gregor, purple and white pea flowers are so boring, why can we not grow pink ones?

Ernie, either I’m a very bad shot with these alpha particles, or atomic nuclei in this gold foil are a lot smaller than we thought

Astronauts came back nanoseconds younger than their stay-at-home peers; Einstein was right…again

Dropped heavy and light ball at Pisa; saw landed at same time. Peer review problems now, especially after telescope incident.

I assume you can all figure out to which historical experiment each of these tweets referred, so no prizes for guesses. But, RPG is running his meme as a competition – Publish your scientific papers on Twitter, so do check it out.

If you want to tweet your own historical science results, then perhaps use #histsci140. I’ve got a stack of science books to give away to any tweets that are super original and clever.