Defined, Not Derived: Ungrounded Physical Primitives as a Second Source of Structural Pathology in Fundamental Physics

Mass, momentum, and energy are treated in standard physics as definitional or operational primitives. Within Quantum-Geometry Dynamics (QGD) they are not independent stipulations but aggregation operators — count, vector sum, and magnitude sum — applied to a single invariant substrate: the momentum vectors of constituent preons(+). This paper identifies the importation of ungrounded definitional primitives as a second, independent source of structural pathology in fundamental physics, parallel to the continuum import already diagnosed in the QGD/MPDT programme. A severity taxonomy (Inert / Non-unique / Divergent / Violating) together with an import-count sub-axis is tested against six cases: relativistic mass, the Abraham–Minkowski ambiguity, the cosmological constant problem, the Higgs hierarchy problem, gravitational-wave energy transport, and the stress-energy tensor. An Inheritance Principle follows: a conservation law can never be better grounded than the quantity it conserves. Conservation laws erected over ungrounded quantities therefore inherit their severity outright. QGD momentum conservation structurally avoids this fate because it is derived directly from the axioms rather than imposed on an imported primitive. A remediation protocol is given using existing apparatus: the Constructibility Criterion as a grounding test and the Uniqueness Theorem as a certification test that disqualifies ad-hoc suppressors such as renormalization and the Higgs mechanism.