This project began when I wondered why our world has a maximum speed. Einstein deduced that nothing goes faster than light from the facts but didn’texplainwhy. In an objective world, things could just go faster and faster, so why don’t they? The thought then occurred that perhaps the speed of light reflects a processing limit, just as my computer screen can only run at a certain frame rate.
In a virtual world, distance is measured in pixels and time in cycles. A simulation has no time except that defined by its processing cycles and no space except that defined by its screen pixels. Asking about the time between cycles or the space between pixels is like asking about a movie between its frames or a picture between its dots, when neither the movie or the picture exist then. A movie running 70 frames a second seems continuous to us because our eyes only refresh 30 times a second. Likewise, a physical universe that refreshes in Planck time, at 1043 times a second, seemed continuous to our instruments until recently. Nothing is shorter than a Planck length and nothing is briefer than Planck time so physical reality has pixels and cycles, like a virtual reality on a screen.
If so, the maximum speed anything can move from point to point is one pixel per cycle. This implies that the maximum speed for our universe is Planck length divided by Planck time, which is indeed the speed of light. The values we use, like 186,000 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second reflect that the units we use, but in quantum units the speed of light is just one.
Quantum realism concludes that the speed of light is always the maximum possible because it is one quantum pixel per quantum cycle.