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!

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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.

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.

I only see varchars sometimes where others see Strings.