Processes, Events, and the Domain of Physical Attribution

This work introduces a formal, operational criterion for distinguishing physical processes from realized events. While many natural and experimental systems exhibit rich, structured dynamics, not all such dynamics license event-level attribution. The central claim of this paper is that correlation, dynamical stability, or descriptive success alone are insufficient to ground physical realization. An event, in the sense developed here, is defined as a physically committed occurrence: one that leaves a stabilized trace, incurs an irreducible energetic cost, persists over a finite temporal window, and resists reversal without additional expenditure. These conditions jointly constrain when event-level language is physically warranted. The framework is developed at a general level and applied across domains, including quantum measurement, decoherence, biochemical catalysis, endocrine regulation, and biological signaling. In each case, the analysis demonstrates that systems may exhibit coherent, informative dynamics while remaining below the threshold required for physical attribution of outcomes. The result is a domain-of-validity criterion that does not modify underlying dynamics or introduce new ontology, but instead specifies when descriptive or statistical success becomes physically binding.