Dimensionality is often treated as a primitive attribute of physical systems. In this work, we adopt an operational perspective in which effective dimension is defined by spectral observ- ables rather than assumed a priori. Using heat-trace and diffusion diagnostics associated with self-adjoint operators, we show that dimensional behavior is inherently scale-dependent and can emerge through ordered spectral activation. In particular, we identify crossover scales governed by spectral gap structure at which new effective degrees of freedom become dynamically acces- sible and, when coherently stabilized over a nontrivial scale window, contribute to observable dimensional behavior. This produces discrete plateaus in spectral dimension, yielding a step- wise pattern of dimensional emergence rather than continuous deformation. The mechanism is robust under perturbations and does not require fine-tuning. We thus reframe dimension as an emergent, coherence-driven spectral phenomenon and provide a general interpretive framework applicable across physical, geometric, and complex systems.
Travis Van Houten (Thu,) studied this question.