This is a common problem when we appeal to continuous natural phenomena, as their common description is usually a convenient, but imprecise, abstraction. Goldreich addressed this in On the philosophical basis of computational theories [1]: "A computational model cannot be justified by merely asserting that it is consistent with some theory of natural phenomena ... The source of trouble is the implicit postulate that asserts that whatever is not forbidden explicitly by the relevant electrical theories, can actually be implemented"[2]
[1]: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/VO/qc-fable.pdf
[2]: He adds "at no cost" because his focus is complexity, not computability
Goldreich demonstrates the problem by showing that our abstractions of electrical circuits don't in themselves preclude circuits that violate computational complexity results or even decide halting, but that alone is insufficient to show that such circuits can actually be built.
There are certain formalisms that make this kind of error harder to spot: actor formalisms make it easy to hide impossible "computation" in a collaborator; some typed formalisms could hide computation in the syntax (which requires a lot or even infinite computation to decide).