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Abstract The nucleus is a complex many-body system with some remarkable emergent collective properties of multiple nucleons acting together. Bohr and Mottelson [1] provided a description of collective motion in nuclei based on geometrical shapes with superimposed oscillations around those shapes. Later, Lie algebras and symmetries were used to describe nuclear dynamics [2], followed by advances in the shell model approach [3] with new effective nucleon-nucleon two- and three-body interactions, and more recently with Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximations within the extended generator coordinate method [4]. Yet, the underlying science question has remained the same. In nuclei, where there is explicit deformation in the ground state, “are the low-lying 0⁺states collective vibrations built on the ground state or are they minima of a coexisting shape?” Ref. [4] has shown that for a significant percentage ofK= 0⁺excitations built on the deformed ground state (g.s.) should, in fact, be a collective vibration. The question has remained open due to sufficiently convincing experimental data with lifetimes, transfer reaction cross sections, andE0 transitions [5]. This paper summarizes the experimental situation regarding the lifetimes of 0⁺states.