Why radioactive decay is so regular

Radioactive decay is the most regular process in nature. It is memoryless: a neutron that has survived ten minutes is exactly as likely to decay in the next second as one made a moment ago. That is why decay follows an exact exponential curve with a fixed half-life. Half-lives do not change with heat, pressure, chemistry or magnetic fields. The rare exceptions involve the atom's electrons. Stripping every electron from rhenium-187, for example, shortens its half-life from about 42 billion years to about 33 years.

RSI explains this pattern. A dissonant knot is not worn down by the field. On every circuit of its escapement it meets the field's clamp and has the same small chance of re-twisting, and nothing carries over from one circuit to the next. A constant chance on every independent try produces exactly the exponential law, as George Gamow showed in 1928 for a particle striking a barrier again and again.

That chance depends only on the medium's tension, the 8.23 × 10²⁸ Pa clamp, the 137-escapement and the energy stored in the knot. These are the same everywhere in the universe, and no laboratory comes close to disturbing them: the highest pressures ever produced in a laboratory fall more than a dozen orders of magnitude short of the clamp. Only the electrons around a nucleus can be changed, which is why every known exception involves them.

The same picture explains why the weak force is universal. Muon decay and nuclear beta decay share one coupling strength because both are knots re-twisting against the same clamp in the same medium. The weak force is the slow, probabilistic face of the tension that holds the proton together.