For decades, physics has explained the transition from the quantum world to the classical world as a loss: coherence dissipates, superposition collapses, and reality “decides.” The notion of neocoherence proposes another reading: not the disappearance of quantum order, but its persistent transformation into a dynamic equilibrium that sustains the world we inhabit.
For much of the twentieth century, physics lived with a fundamental discomfort. On the one hand, quantum mechanics described a profoundly indeterminate universe, where particles could occupy multiple states at once and where the future was not written. On the other hand, the everyday world—tables, bodies, planets—behaved with an almost stubborn stability. The great problem was not only to explain one or the other, but to understand how both could belong to the same universe.
The dominant response was decoherence. According to this approach, quantum systems rapidly lose their coherence when interacting with the environment. Thermal noise, complexity, and the multiplicity of interactions destroy delicate superpositions, forcing the system to behave in a classical way. A stable world emerges, but at the price of a renunciation: the quantum is relegated to the background, as an infantile phase that has been surpassed.
The proposal of neocoherence does not deny this process, but reformulates it at its roots.
The question is not only how coherence is lost, but what kind of order persists afterward. Because something does persist. If everything truly collapsed, the world would not be stable: it would be chaotic, erratic, unpredictable at every instant. And it is not.
Neocoherence names precisely that persistence: an intermediate, dynamic regime in which coherence does not disappear, but reorganizes itself. It is neither the pure coherence of an isolated system nor absolute thermal chaos. It is a negotiated order.
In this sense, neocoherence does not describe a state, but a process. A process by which physical systems maintain stable patterns amid constant interaction with their environment. Stability does not arise from closure, but from relation. The world does not endure because it is isolated, but because it is continuously adjusting.
This idea has profound consequences.
First, it challenges the linear image of time implicit in many scientific narratives. If coherence is “lost” once and for all, time seems to advance like a clean arrow: from quantum order to classical order, from an indeterminate past to a fixed present. But if coherence transforms and persists, time ceases to be a simple transition and becomes a permanent negotiation between openness and stability.
Reality, then, is not decided once and for all. It is being sustained.
From this perspective, macroscopic objects—a stone, a human body, a planet—are not solid entities in a strong sense. They are neocoherent dynamic equilibria. They persist because they maintain a stable organization in the face of constant perturbations. Not because they have definitively exited the quantum domain, but because they have learned to coexist with it.
This reading makes it possible to build a bridge between three domains that are often thought separately: quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and relativity.
Quantum mechanics describes the field of possibilities: open states, superpositions, coexisting futures. Thermodynamics introduces irreversibility: each interaction leaves a trace, produces entropy, selects paths. Relativity, for its part, describes the geometric support in which those decisions stabilize and persist over time.
Neocoherence appears precisely at that intersection. It is the way a system maintains structure after having passed through innumerable irreversible decisions. It is not the negation of entropy, but its management. Not the elimination of noise, but its integration.
From an everyday perspective, this is intuitive. A living organism does not maintain its form by resisting the environment, but by exchanging energy with it. It breathes, feeds, adapts. Its stability is not rigid, but flexible. Something similar occurs at a deeper physical level.
Thinking coherence in this way also forces us to revisit our language. In many languages—such as English—there is no clear distinction between “being” as essence and “being” as state. Everything is reduced to “to be.” This linguistic limitation does not prevent physics, but it does condition how processes are conceptualized. There is a tendency to think in terms of fixed identities, even when models describe dynamics.
Languages such as Spanish allow another approach. It is not the same to “be” (ser) as to “be” (estar), and even less so to “estar siendo” (to be in the process of being). This latter form does not fix, does not close, does not define an essence. It describes an ongoing process. Neocoherence belongs precisely to that domain: not to definitive being, but to being-in-process sustained.
From this viewpoint, the passage from the quantum world to the classical world is not a rupture, but a rough continuity. Not a straight line, but a surface with folds. There are more coherent regions, noisier ones, slow transitions, unexpected persistences.
The universe does not erase its past. It drags it along.
This has implications even for how we understand scientific knowledge. Models do not describe the totality of the process; they capture averages, regularities, dominant behaviors. They work, and they work very well. But they do not exhaust reality. Neocoherence points precisely to those margins where order does not collapse, but is reconfigured.
It is not a matter of opposing a new paradigm to existing ones, but of refining the reading. Of accepting that stability is not an endpoint, but a constant practice of the universe. That reality does not “is” once and for all, but is being sustained at every instant.
In times when science is invoked both to promise absolute certainties and to justify dangerous simplifications, thinking neocoherence is a critical gesture. It reminds us that the world does not function through closure, but through dynamic equilibrium. That complexity is not a defect, but a condition.
And that, perhaps, the task of thought is not to fix reality, but to learn to read how it resists without collapsing.
