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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number
> 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.
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.
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.
>Surprised this perplexes people
Is just really funny. Peak HN, thank you