Sean Downes – Medium

Sean Downes

The Look Elsewhere Effect

Statistics is a hard subject. Evidence based decision making hinges on our ability to understand the evidence. Human intuition often…

Nov 22, 2022

The Look Elsewhere Effect

Nov 22, 2022

The Perils of Science Communication

Where do we draw the line between Outreach and Clickbait?

Nov 3, 2022

The Perils of Science Communication

Nov 3, 2022

The Astrophysics of Plasmas

In our second installment, we connect the physics of electrically charged gases to cosmic rays we observe on Earth.

Sep 21, 2022

A graph of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distriubtion is presented for four randomly chosen temperatures. The plots are all Gaussian-like bumps, with the mean value moving towards larger particle speed while it simultaneously spreads. Temperatures from low to high are represented red, green, blue and magenta.

Sep 21, 2022

Particles from Space

Hey Friends!

Sep 19, 2022

Photo of a pen-sketched cosmic ray tree of particle decays over the cartoon arc of the earth with dots in the background. It’s embossed in black ink on heavyweight, cream colored paper.

Sep 19, 2022

Some Physics of Muon Colliders

Last time we contrasted the performance of lepton and hadron colliders. Hadrons are messy, composite things like protons that enjoy a…

Aug 20, 2022

Some Physics of Muon Colliders

Aug 20, 2022

We Should Build a Muon Collider

The construction of these behemoth experiments has only gotten more complex. For particle physics to progress, we need to move…

Aug 11, 2022

A cartoon drawing of a muon / antimuon collision.

Aug 11, 2022

The Field Guide to Particle Physics: the Positron

Some antimatter with serious applications to medical imaging.

Jul 23, 2022

Jul 23, 2022

Do we really need new particle physics?

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has made the “paradigm shift” into a trope for scientific progress. While this model…

Jul 21, 2022

Various vacuum polarization diagrams, variations of a photon converting to an electron-positron pair, and back to a photon. Near the bottom there’s a Higgs version, where a top / anti top pair forms a loop.

Jul 21, 2022

Two Recent Supernovae

It’s hard to exaggerate the explosive power of supernovae. When triggered, a single supernova outshines the brightness of an entire galaxy…

Feb 23, 2022

Two Recent Supernovae

Feb 23, 2022

Lagrange Points and other Curious Orbits

The Demotion of Pluto

Feb 4, 2022

Lagrange Points and other Curious Orbits

Feb 4, 2022

Sean Downes

Sean Downes

Theoretical physicist at the Pasayten Institute (pasayten.org). Sometimes known as SeanForScience. Spends an inordinate amount of time outside "running".

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