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)
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.
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.
If things have a similarity as you change scale and if things also reduce to strings, then we would expect to see strings at all scales, which we definitely don't.
That said, she makes the following observation at the end of the interview: "Asymptotic safety could be compatible with these other approaches. Perhaps at the fundamental scale there are strings or loops or something, but then as you zoom out you hit a realm where things change so slowly for a while that it looks as if you’re at a fixed point."
So while asymptotic safety is not fully compatible with string theory, the physical difference between them could be very small.
> 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.
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!
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
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.
If things have a similarity as you change scale and if things also reduce to strings, then we would expect to see strings at all scales, which we definitely don't.
That said, she makes the following observation at the end of the interview: "Asymptotic safety could be compatible with these other approaches. Perhaps at the fundamental scale there are strings or loops or something, but then as you zoom out you hit a realm where things change so slowly for a while that it looks as if you’re at a fixed point."
So while asymptotic safety is not fully compatible with string theory, the physical difference between them could be very small.
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.
>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.