The headline feels off. Which, fair, headline.

But "seeing fractals" feels like a cheat of saying, things have a similarity as you change scale. This could be true even if you think things reduce to strings/loops/whatever. Such that contrasting fractals to strings feels off.

Still a neat and fun article.

Asymptotic Safety also predicted the higgs mass (126 GeV vs the measured value of 125 GeV). https://arxiv.org/abs/0912.0208

The trick is, at that time most of the possible mass range was excluded experimentally, so it is a bit less impressive. I'm not sure how much tuning went into it (possibly none)

I see a spacetime with no time, only mass and energy.

Read on and see the retropredictions of top and bottom quark energies!

• jerf

  today at 5:26 PM

  Even a retrodiction can be impressive and/or interesting if it is a sufficiently "nothing up my sleeve" [1] type of prediction. I don't know enough about this field and the article isn't informative enough for me to guess, but it's possible that they made a retrodiction where they didn't tune the parameters for it explicitly and got near the correct result directly. In that case, it would at least constitute some sort of clue, even if it isn't necessarily correct. Or they could have tuned the heck out of it and glossed over it in the article, I dunno.

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number

[flagged]

TL;DR: scientists are still pursuing science.

> Eichhorn and her colleagues are pursuing a different possibility. In 1976, Steven Weinberg, a theorist who would eventually earn a Nobel Prize, pointed out that if you zoomed in far enough, you might reach a place where the rules of physics would stop changing. New realms would stop appearing; the intensities of the forces would stabilize; and gravity would turn out to make perfect sense after all.

• john_strinlai

  today at 7:00 PM

  >TL;DR: scientists are still pursuing science.

  if that is the entirety of what you took away from reading this (or, the entirety of what you think other people should take away), that is a shame.

Obviously forces of nature go from strong to weak with scale, and there is probably one that is even weaker than gravity holding galaxies together. Surprised this perplexes people.

• mikkupikku

  today at 6:10 PM

  Just hand waving a suppose force isn't going to satisfy anybody in this domain, you've got to back it up with some math at least before anybody cares.

• idiotsecant

  today at 6:48 PM

  'I just made up some random loose assertions that I am taking to be self evident so that I can feel smug about them'

  There is a reason intuition is insufficient at these scales - it's extremely frequently wrong. Your navel gazing is worth only the lint you find.

  • nurettin

    today at 7:03 PM

    I will leave the comment up for people to vent at. Perhaps their day will get just a little better.

    • aethrum

      today at 7:08 PM

      The

      >Surprised this perplexes people

      Is just really funny. Peak HN, thank you

I only see varchars sometimes where others see Strings.