Ben Brubaker
Ben Brubaker — Staff writer at Quanta Magazine, former experimental physicist
Quanta Magazine staff writer covering theoretical computer science and physics research.
benbrubaker.comNobody knows how to prove the Collatz conjecture, and that's why researchers don't know how to conclusively determine whether Antihydra halts.
A science journalist with a physics PhD who writes about how physicists and computer scientists make sense of the world. Ben's personal blog "Measuring in Reflection" tackles subjects like busy beaver numbers, quantum transducers, and the Collatz conjecture with the same clarity he brings to his work at Quanta Magazine. He has a gift for making the abstract feel graspable without dumbing it down.
Written by Ben Brubaker.
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Why Busy Beaver Hunters Fear the Antihydra
In the summer of 2024, I reported on an online community that nailed down the precise value of a number called BB(5) — the first big breakthrough in 50 years on an old problem in theoretical computer science known as the busy beaver game. BB(5), now known to be 47,176,870, is the fifth of the so-called busy beaver numbers, which measure the complexity of the craziest computations that simple… Source
Toward the Ideal Elevator Display
I have raised this blog from the dead to tell of the untapped aesthetic potential of seven-segment displays — the digital displays used in calculators, microwaves, and elevators. Imagine you’re riding an elevator up from the first floor, watching the numbers tick up as you go. You will see something like this: The transition from 2 to 3, effected by a single segment sliding to the right… Source
Why Build a Quantum Transducer?
The paper reporting the main result of my postdoctoral research was finally published on Tuesday, nearly a year after my departure from Boulder. I wrote a twitter thread about the paper when we posted it online in preprint form six months ago, but I thought I’d take this occasion to rouse the blog from its regular slumber and write something longer. This result is part of an ongoing research… Source
On Error
Say the answer you get is 3 when you’re supposed to get 4. Did you do something wrong? Most of the students I taught in freshman physics lab courses seemed to think so.1 I can’t tell you how many times I saw statements in lab reports like “Our value for \(g\) was not the same as the accepted value. This may have been due to human error.” With all due respect to Alexander Pope… Source
Of Lifetimes and Linewidths
Today Quanta published an explainer I wrote on the subject of resonance. Regular readers of this irregularly maintained blog will know that resonance is among my favorite topics in physics: from axion dark matter detectors to macroscopic quantum physics to the effects of tardigrades on superconducting qubits, my posts keep touching on resonance one way or another. Resonance… Source
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Works in Progress RSS Feed
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Science writing that respects your intelligence — complex ideas explained clearly by someone who used to work in the lab.