  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.
