[HN Gopher] Physicist Astrid Eichhorn is a leader in the field o...
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Physicist Astrid Eichhorn is a leader in the field of asymptotic
safety
Author : tzury
Score : 100 points
Date : 2026-03-11 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| Read on and see the retropredictions of top and bottom quark
| energies!
| jerf wrote:
| 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
| irishcoffee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| 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)
| user3939382 wrote:
| I see a spacetime with no time, only mass and energy.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| munchler wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| Agreed. And again, fair that I was critiquing the headline. I
| think I just balked at the use of fractals there implying
| that they were, themselves, somehow contrasted to other
| descriptions.
|
| On things happening strangely at different scales, I confess
| I always thought this had to have some parallel to how basic
| scaling itself changes for values between zero and one. Fun
| to read more on it.
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