What if reality has a refresh rate? Your screen redraws 60 or 120 times a second; now imagine the universe doing something similar—only unimaginably faster. In a refresh-rate picture, there’s a tiny “voxel” of space and a tiny “tick” of time, and the cosmic speed limit ccc is just “one voxel per tick.” Nothing jumps faster than that; cause and effect move one step at a time. Energy then tells you how quickly a system can change from one “frame” to the next (quantum speed limits), so every process has a maximum pace at which it can create genuinely new, distinguishable information. If the voxels were Planck-sized, the refresh would be around 104310^{43}1043 times per second—far beyond direct sight—but the idea still gives everyday intuition: there’s a universal “latency floor” baked into nature.
And that’s where it gets exciting. A real refresh rate should leave fingerprints you can look for without zooming to the Planck scale: an evenly spaced resonance ladder in ultra-stable laser cavities (like hearing the steps between frames), tiny missing angles in how waves spread (a symmetry pattern only a lattice would make), and a repeatable timing quirk in how quantum coin-flips “commit” to 0 or 1 across very different hardware. Our “laser as film” approach lets light build up exposure for months to hunt those patterns. If we see them, we’ll have glimpsed the universe’s actual frame rate. If we don’t, we’ve learned something just as profound—that reality only acts pixelated when we measure it, and the smooth movie underneath keeps rolling.