POINT ABSTRACTIONS AND THE SCALE-DEPENDENT LIMIT OF PHYSICAL MECHANISM

This paper examines the use of point abstractions in physics under a strict mechanism-only framework, asking whether treating extended physical systems as points constitutes a physically enforcing description or a purely descriptive convenience. By restricting admissible causes to local energy–momentum exchange between contiguous material regions, the paper applies enforcement and removal tests to point-based representations such as point particles and center-of-mass approximations. It shows that point abstractions do not themselves exchange energy or momentum, do not propagate influence, and do not undergo reciprocal back-reaction. Removing the point abstraction leaves all physical interactions intact, while removing local exchange collapses physical behavior entirely. The paper concludes, by logical necessity, that point abstractions are non-causal descriptive tools whose validity is scale-limited, and that treating large or internally structured systems as points suppresses physically relevant geometry and propagation constraints without providing a physical mechanism.