Abstract The companion paper SIP-EP-02 diagnosed latency as regulatory failure — the cost of "we didn't know" in civil governance and research. This paper asks the harder question: Why doesn't recoherence happen even when latency is reduced? Why do systems that possess the information, authority, and mechanisms to act nonetheless fail to act? We propose that recoherence requires a condensation nucleus: a triplet N = A, D, C representing Authority (correctly assigned), Deliberation (appropriately bounded), and Commitment (mechanistically triggered). Modern governance systematically disrupts nucleation through sequential bottlenecks, while Aboriginal Australian fire management systems achieved nucleation probability P ≈ 1 through architectural integration spanning 65, 000 years. The mathematical framework introduces a sequential activation coefficient derived from signal detection theory: α = P (A) × P (D|A) × P (C|A, D) × η (Φ) This formulation explains why adding authority without fixing deliberation produces no improvement (Lahaina), why infinite deliberation with absent commitment produces permanent deferral (string theory), and why systems where deliberation equals action achieve near-certain nucleation (Aboriginal fire management). Version 1. 1 extends the framework with: (1) the η (Φ) information sufficiency term derived from Poisson signal arrival; (2) nucleation fidelity (β) distinguishing action occurrence from action appropriateness; (3) Relational Authority as an alternative to role-based authority, drawn from Aboriginal governance; and (4) implementation evidence from aviation safety and healthcare incident reporting. We introduce the Teacher Problematic: the pathological case where the person nominally responsible for nucleation is themselves the source of decoherence. Design principles are provided with quantitative targets for emergency response (P (D|A) 0. 95).
Smith et al. (Fri,) studied this question.