Nuclear Stability as a Temporally Sustained Coherence Regime

Abstract Nuclear stability and radioactive decay are described with exceptional quantitative success by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and nuclear effective field theories (EFT). Yet the interpretive story that typically accompanies these formalisms remains incomplete: binding energy is often treated as a static energy‑difference bookkeeping result, leaving unarticulated what physical condition is being maintained during the long intervals in which decay does not occur. As a consequence, the suddenness and probabilism of decay are frequently treated as narrative primitives rather than conceptually integrated features of nuclear persistence. This paper proposes an interpretive framework in which nuclear stability is understood as a temporally sustained coherence regime: an organised condition of sub‑nuclear degrees of freedom maintained through continual internal coordination and constraint. Within this view, “stored binding energy” is not a latent reservoir but a shorthand for the energetic signature of sustaining organisation against available disorganisation pathways. Radioactive decay is correspondingly interpreted as coherence‑collapse—a regime transition in which maintenance fails and the system rapidly reorganises into new stable or metastable products, emitting radiation through empirically established channels. The proposal is explicitly interpretive rather than dynamical: it introduces no new particles, forces, decay channels, or deviations from established calculations in QCD or nuclear EFT. The aim is to clarify how nuclear persistence, probabilistic decay, and sudden energy release may be understood as logically connected aspects of a single organisational narrative. This version is made available as a preprint.