Like most pop-sci, there's enough nuance to be found in the papers to tell its own story. I wasn't familiar with the Shaposhnikov and Wetterich paper, or asymptotic safety in general, and that 126 GeV Higgs mass prediction is the best I've seen. Their paper ends with
"Detecting the Higgs scalar with mass around 126 GeV at the LHC could give a strong hint for the absence of new physics influencing the running of the SM couplings between the Fermi and Planck/unification scales"
which seems surprisingly prescient after a decade of null results from the LHC. So why is this ignored in mainstream (aka not youtube) physics?<p>Well, a quick search on InspireHEP shows a 2019 paper [1] that adds on Shaposhnikov and Wtterich's. Of note is that an updated top mass value changes the Higgs mass prediction to 132 GeV, rather in tension with 125 GeV. (The paper then cleverly tries to extend the Standard Model to adjust the prediction back to the measured Higgs mass.) The original argument doesn't look like such a slam dunk anymore.<p>[1] Kwapisz, "Asymptotic safety, the Higgs mass and beyond the Standard Model physics"
Apparently there is a boring approach to "quantum gravity" based on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_safety_in_quantum_gravity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_safety_in_quantum_g...</a><p>A prediction for the weight of Higgs boson particle using this, and it came true.
“My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition there.” (Indira Gandhi)