Surfaces, Not Tunnels: A Scale-Invariant Admissibility Principle for Wormhole-Class Phenomena

Wormholes are frequently represented as tunnels that permit traversal or effective distance reduction through spacetime. Such interpretations persist despite repeated violations of admissibility, including instability under perturbation, causal inconsistency, and unrepayable constraint budgets. This paper introduces a scale-invariant admissibility principle that reframes wormhole-class phenomena as boundary surfaces rather than transport pathways. The principle asserts that any admissible wormhole-class structure must preserve the full causal, energetic, and distance ledger at every scale, while permitting only boundary-level mirroring—visibility, correlation, or informational alignment—without enabling traversal. Apparent shortcuts arise from matched, oppositely oriented constraints that refract description across a boundary; such refraction alters representation without permitting physical motion. This framework is viability-first and non-interfering: it does not modify governing equations, introduce new forces, or propose transport mechanisms. Instead, it functions as an interpretive admissibility filter that distinguishes physically meaningful structures from representational artifacts. By insisting on real, touchable interaction at the observer’s scale while preserving global constraint accounting, the principle explains why wormhole-class phenomena appear observable and structurally real yet remain non-traversable. No new physics is proposed.