If no information gain implies no disturbance, then any discrete physical theory is classical

TL;DR

The paper argues that any discrete physical theory must be classical, based on a postulate linking information gain and disturbance, and demonstrates that quantum and non-local theories cannot be discrete without losing their non-classical features.

Contribution

It introduces a physical postulate connecting information gain and disturbance to rule out non-classical discrete theories, including quantum mechanics and PR-box models.

Findings

Discrete theories are necessarily classical under the postulate.

Quantum mechanics' property that information gain implies disturbance is consistent with the postulate.

Non-local models like PR-box are incompatible with the postulate.

Abstract

It has been suggested that nature could be discrete in the sense that the underlying state space of a physical system has only a finite number of pure states. For example, the Bloch ball of a single qubit could be discretized into small patches and only appear round to us due to experimental limitations. Here, we present a strong physical argument for the quantum theoretical property that every state space (even the smallest possible one, the qubit) has infinitely many pure states. We propose a simple physical postulate which dictates that in fact the only possible discrete theory is classical mechanics. More specifically, we postulate that no information gain implies no disturbance, or read in the contrapositive, that disturbance leads to some form of information gain. In a theory like quantum mechanics where we already know that the converse holds, i.e. information gain does imply disturbance, this can be understood as postulating an equivalence between disturbance and information gain. What is more, we show that non-classical discrete theories are still ruled out even if we relax the postulate to hold only approximately in the sense that no information gain only causes a small amount of disturbance. Finally, our postulate also rules out popular generalizations such as the PR-box that allows non-local correlations beyond the limits of quantum theory.