Neutron stars display a distinctive combination of extreme long-term stability and sudden, discontinuous behavior, including glitches, quasi-periodic oscillations, magnetar flares, and prolonged post-event relaxation. Conventional explanations typically treat these phenomena as arising from separate mechanisms—crustal fracture, superfluid vortex motion, or magnetospheric reconnection—without a unifying physical principle. This paper develops an alternative interpretation in which neutron stars are governed by the dynamics of a coherence boundary that mediates coupling between a highly coherent interior and the surrounding environment. Within this framework, rotation supplies structured stress, curvature enforces discrete allowable configurations, and energy is stored elastically at the boundary and released abruptly through depinning and mode conversion. Starquakes are reinterpreted as triggers that alter boundary stability rather than as primary energy sources. The resulting boundary-dynamics model naturally explains discrete glitch sizes, correlated multi-observable changes, rapid energy release without gradual precursors, and long-lived post-event memory. A set of specific, falsifiable astronomical predictions is presented, along with concrete observational strategies based on existing public datasets. Regardless of its ultimate validity, the framework highlights the central role of coherence boundaries in organizing stability and dissipation in extreme astrophysical systems.
S. Cobb (Sun,) studied this question.