3 ms·
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 b
by taeric 7mo ago
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 7mo agoIf 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 7mo agoAgreed. 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.
- hammock 7mo agoThe fractals idea is less about the common popsci “zoom in or out and it looks the same” property that most people are familiar with. What it’s really about is criticality(1), a point between chaos and order where all the interesting things happen. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality