The Dynamic Principle of Permanence

This essay asks why the world has the form it has and not another, starting from a measurable fact: of the thousands of possible proton–neutron combinations, only about 250 stable nuclei persist. The nuclear case suggests a clean answer — what endures occupies a deep well, separated from equilibrium by a barrier — and the essay asks whether the same functional form (drift against noise up to an absorbing boundary; a first-passage escape time) reappears across the chemical, biochemical, biological, human and social scales. Five stochastic simulations, one per scale and each built on a canonical model, are constructed so that permanence is always a measured output, never an input. The recurring pattern is formalized as the Dynamic Principle of Permanence (DPP), and its status is stated explicitly: it has one hard, non-circular empirical anchor (alpha decay, the Geiger–Nuttall law), while at the social scale the strong version is not confirmed — survival analysis of political-regime durations cannot distinguish erosion from mere heterogeneity. The DPP is therefore offered as a common lens, and as a law only in the domain where the barrier is measured independently of the outcome. Two companion papers develop the rigorous empirical test and the formal object.