It seems pretty clear to me that this desire for "perfect" layers of abstraction is something we strive for due to our own intellectual limits, and that in real

It seems pretty clear to me that this desire for "perfect" layers of abstraction is something we strive for due to our own intellectual limits, and that in reality all abstractions are lossy to some degree. Heat as a single integer in Degrees F is good enough most of the time but when you're designing CVD for a Silicon Fab you might actually care about the positions and orientations and vectors of the gas molecules.