The Coherence Engine

The Coherence Engine presents a unified operational framework for understanding how physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems persist and adapt. It identifies coherence, recursive structural reinforcement, as the single invariant governing system viability across scales. Using minimal state representation and a universal update law, the framework models system evolution as the joint ascent of coherence gradients and descent of entropy gradients while preserving future adaptive capacity. The Spectrum of Possibility defines feasible trajectories, and Recursive Choice selects those maximizing coherence curvature under constraints of noise, leakage, and dimensional change. Diverse scientific domains emerge as instantiations of the same kernel with quantum processes as coherence-weighted transitions, information as coherence-weighted entropy, cognition as attractor navigation, evolution as coherence selection, and societal dynamics as shifts in multi-scale structural alignment. By making coherence computable and measurable, the Coherence Engine enables simulation, empirical testing, and principled design of systems that must remain viable under uncertainty.