Why the Bit–Tick Framework Isn’t One Idea Among Many — It’s What’s Left
Modern physics is often presented as a landscape of competing theories: particles or fields, strings or loops, continuous spacetime or discrete geometry. But there’s a deeper question that usually goes unasked: what must any physical theory look like if it is to make contact with real experiments at all?
In this work, we don’t start by guessing what reality is made of. We start by stating four simple, almost unavoidable facts about how physics works in practice: experiments have finite resolution, clocks measure time by counting events, bounded systems can only hold finite information, and physics shouldn’t rely on distinctions no experiment could ever detect. These aren’t philosophical preferences — they’re requirements forced on us by the way science is actually done.
Once you take those constraints seriously, something remarkable happens: the space of possible theories collapses.
Elimination, Not Speculation
The bit–tick framework is not proposed as a clever new model or an alternative interpretation. It emerges from a process of elimination. If a theory claims more structure than experiments can ever access, that structure is physically meaningless. If it requires infinite precision, infinite control, or infinite information extraction, it cannot be realised in the real world. If it treats time as something other than what clocks record, it breaks its connection to measurement.
When you remove everything that violates these constraints, what remains is surprisingly minimal:
- bits, which quantify what can be distinguished in a measurement, and
- ticks, which count the irreversible succession of events along a clock’s history.
Nothing else survives intact.
Why This Isn’t Just “Information Is Fundamental”
Many approaches gesture at information as something important. What’s different here is that information isn’t an added assumption — it’s forced on us. If you insist that experiments have finite readouts, finite duration, finite noise, and finite physical controllability, then only a finite number of distinctions can ever be operationally real. Continuous structures may still be useful mathematically, but they collapse into finite equivalence classes when filtered through real experimental limits.
The bit–tick framework is simply the invariant core that all viable physical theories share once this filtering is applied. Particles, fields, strings, and geometries can still exist as descriptions — but they all reduce to the same operational substrate when you strip away what can’t be tested.
Not Chosen — Forced
This is the key point: the framework is not chosen; it is forced.
You can reject it, but only by rejecting at least one of the axioms — and each axiom corresponds to something deeply physical:
- finite distinguishability (entropy bounds),
- operational time (what clocks measure),
- no surplus structure (testability),
- and finite experimental resources.
Deny any one of these, and you’re no longer doing operational physics. Accept them, and the bit–tick structure is what’s left standing.
A Narrowing, Not a Unification
This work doesn’t tell us what the correct dynamics of the universe are. It doesn’t replace quantum field theory or general relativity. Instead, it does something more foundational: it narrows the space of admissible theories.
Just as special relativity narrowed physics to Lorentz-invariant laws, and quantum theory narrowed it to Hilbert-space structure, the bit–tick framework narrows it further — to theories whose fundamental content can be expressed entirely in terms of finite distinguishability and counted temporal succession.
In that sense, it’s not a theory of everything. It’s a proof about what any theory of everything must already contain.
Empirical Status of the Axioms
The Second paper, the Emprical Status of the Axioms sets out to address a foundational question raised by the bit–tick uniqueness and no-go results: whether the axioms underpinning that framework are merely methodological assumptions, or whether they are in fact enforced by the empirical behavior of the universe.
By examining each axiom in turn, we have shown that all four—finite perfect distinguishability, operational time, no surplus structure, and finite accessible information—are deeply embedded in successful physical theory and experimental practice. They are not speculative metaphysical claims, but concise summaries of constraints repeatedly encountered across quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, information theory, and real-world experimentation.