Quanta Magazine

Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals

Physicist Astrid Eichhorn leads the asymptotic safety program, proposing that quantum‑gravity interactions become scale‑invariant at the Planck scale, yielding a fractal‑like space‑time. Her work shows that a fixed point persists even when all known matter fields are included, allowing the theory to retrodict the Higgs, top and bottom quark masses within 10 %. Eichhorn also argues that several popular dark‑matter candidates are incompatible with a scale‑symmetric universe, turning experimental searches into indirect tests of quantum gravity. The approach offers a conservative, mathematically robust alternative to string or loop quantum gravity.