ON THE FINITE PHYSICAL REALIZABILITY OF OBSERVERS ALONG INERTIAL WORLDLINES

This paper examines whether a physical observer can persist indefinitely while traveling along an inertial worldline. Treating observation as a materially implemented, record-bearing process, it shows that observation necessarily requires continuous dissipation to stabilize records against noise and degradation. Because any dissipative system operating with finite resources has a finite operational lifetime, the capacity for observation must terminate in finite proper time, even if the mathematical description of the worldline extends without bound. The result introduces no new physics and identifies a physical limit on the realizability of idealized observers in classical and relativistic theories.