The Higgs at 125 GeV sits seventeen orders below the Planck scale, and quantum corrections drag it toward any high cutoff quadratically, demanding tuning of one part in 10³⁴ if the Planck scale is physical. Every natural stabilizer, supersymmetry, compositeness, extra dimensions, predicted TeV-scale discoveries the LHC has not delivered, leaving particle physics choosing between anthropics and abandoning naturalness.
The problem's engine is an extrapolation: gravity is assumed valid to arbitrarily small lengths, so its coupling defines a physical quantum-gravity cutoff at 10¹⁹ GeV that everything light must be protected from. The destabilizing scale has never been observed; it is general relativity's constant pushed twenty orders past its tested domain and then treated as a wall.
SCT bounds gravity's domain explicitly: the unified field equation carries the specifier [0.08 fm ≤ r] (P66, P67), with general relativity handing off to QCD degeneracy physics at nuclear densities rather than running to the Planck length. The domain boundary is not an ad hoc cutoff but the third structural modification of the field equations, the same one that replaces black hole singularities with finite-density polyquark cores. Under it, the Planck scale is arithmetic, not physics: the place where an extrapolation outside its domain would have become strongly coupled, never reached by any gravitational degree of freedom, and therefore unavailable to destabilize the Higgs. The hierarchy between the weak scale and a gravitational cutoff dissolves because the cutoff was the model applied where it does not hold (P65: each modification reduces to standard results in the appropriate limit).
The honest scope: the Standard Model's internal naturalness questions, why the Higgs is light relative to any heavy new particles that may exist, remain particle physics, untouched by SCT. What SCT removes is the gravitational anchor of the problem, the 10¹⁹ GeV wall that converted a question into a crisis, and it removes it testably, because the same domain boundary makes compact-object predictions instruments can check.
This is the same QCD-bounded gravity behind the polyquark mass-radius band and the singularity replacement. There is no need to invoke superpartners to guard the Higgs from a scale that is not there.
The domain boundary is falsifiable at its observable end: gravitational-wave ringdowns confirming clean Kerr behavior to precision excluding any finite-surface core structure, or NICER-class measurements incompatible with the QCD-bounded mass-radius band, would remove the [0.08 fm ≤ r] specifier and restore gravity's run toward the Planck scale, reinstating the hierarchy problem's premise. Conversely, post-merger echoes or polyquark-band confirmations entrench the bounded domain.