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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.