By the time a physical theory begins to impact the engineering community, the theory would seem to contain something substantial.

This article may be helpful in answering.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ea4d/2d5f5158a4e661618b8516bc466aec96fb74.pdf

No. The Standard Model is defined by quantum criticality-this isn't a new feature. How the gauge couplings evolve with scale has been calculated and has been measured, also. 

Standard model is a chiral theory. Left and right handed components of quarks and leptons transform differently under SU(2)L x U(1)Y transformations. Yukawa couplings are of the form psi_L^bar phi_R Higgs; such trilinear terms are gauge singlets as a whole. Vacuum expectation value of the Higgs lead to mass terms; which are in general bilinear terms in fields. For example if phi_R is psi_R, such a trilinear term will give a mass term of the field psi. Both Yukawa couplings and masses can be probed by high energy experiments.

Sometimes RG evolution can show a fixed point structure essentially because such couplings are not really constants but they are scale dependent quantities. This phenomenon is seen both for Yukawa couplings or gauge couplings. In these cases numerical values of couplings at low energy looses their sensitivity to high energy values. For a large range of values at high energy one obtains a fixed value at low energy. Such theories show some predictivity.

Thanks for answers. I'm a bit surprised, which is a good reason for asking questions. Much is still being written about free parameters in the standard model. apparently by people who are not quite up to date.

Matti Pitkänen was much the maverick decades ago when he started work on TGD. The suggestion that General Relativity needed an extension at high energy was largely unacceptable to a majority of researchers. I avoided TGD as it was recommended to me by research associates, because the math is difficult and it didn't seem to impact the engineering community. Then I began work on high speed in deep space and realized the high energy deficiency in GR that a lot of scientists had been working on for a long time.

Just recently I was surprised by the RG community in which a substantial number of researchers expressed opinions that GR must join with Quantum Mechanics at some extreme high energy into a unified theory.

In my project for high speed in deep space it became important for the engineering design to understand how "gauge couplings evolve with scale." Also the project was completed with favorable results because a way was found to make use of the concept that "couplings are not really constants but they are scale dependent quantities."

That the couplings of the known interactions evolve with the energy scale is completely irrelevant for space exploration, because the probes-rockets and satellites-are classical,  not quantum, objects. And regarding gravity, these probes don't affect the spacetime geometry, either, in ways that could probe quantum superpositions.  

It isn't controversial that, when quantum properties of matter can affect spacetime geometry, this would mean that quantum properties of the geometry must be described-it's just not known, yet, how this can be realized.

I study the high speed part of space travel in deep space with prolonged acceleration. approaching light speed. With so much energy involved there does appear to be a relevant evolution of couplings as speed increases. In this representation QM and GR are connected together.

The key to this approach is the realization that kinetic energy resides in a convex curvature of local space, and there is a preferred zero velocity at any location based on Doppler measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background.

Albert Einstein suggested a field approach to kinetic energy in his autobiographical notes first published in 1949. He wasn't able to develop it because the CMB was not discovered in his life time. Einstein had no way to define a zero velocity.

Energy is transferred between the accelerating vehicle and the space it passes through, using the couplings that evolve with energy  scale.

Scale Relativity offers a fractal approach to space geometry. Also the concept of squeezed quantum states offers a similar approach. Most helpful to me in completing the study was TGD theory and the evolution of Planck Constant with energy scales.

Maybe we don't know how this can be realized, to describe the quantum properties of geometry, but people are working on it and these three theories are offered to me leading to the same conclusions.

Geometry must eventually be reconciled with the ZPE and Casimir effect. Continuum geometry applies to large scales, but on a small scale it is the ZPE, which means QM is controlling. The continuum of large scale comes as an average of ZPE effects on the micro scale.

So in another thread I asked the question does stress energy change the amplitude and frequency of ZPE?

On RG we should discover new things and understand old things, which is the reason for writing.    

The energy involved in sending rockets into space doesn't modify spacetime in any significant way-and this can be quantified. The energy transfer is negligible for a rocket, less so for a planet. But a planet is a classical object, therefore doesn't lead to superpositions of spacetime geometries. 

What matters isn't the curvature of space-but of spacetime. While the CMB does define a frame, there's nothing special about it and a rocket moving in the universe doesn't affect it or is being affected by it. 

Einstein knew everything that there is to know about zero velocity-that it doesn't make sense as an invariant notion in gravity, because it isn't invariant under general coordinate transformations. 

And all this is completely irrelevant to the running of the parameters of the Standard Model, that, by definition, doesn't include gravity. 

Classical geometry is perfectly consistent with zero-point energy: the latter is described by the cosmological constant. However how the spacetime geometry reacts to the zero-point energy of quantum matter isn't known, since Einstein's equations are classical. 

On the other hand, the Casimir effect describes the quantum fluctuations of the energy of matter about the average value. How to describe the quantum fluctuations of spacetime geometry that the quantum fluctuations of the energy of matter would lead to isn't known.