Rentup

Rentup

the twist of the aether

The rentup as proposed — a pair of opposed twists, never fewer than two — and as observed: a field of nothing.

Type	Proposed elementary particle
Of	the luminiferous aether
Composition	A single twist of the medium
Observed	Never
Found singly	Never — see below
Detectable properties	None

The rentup is the proposed elementary particle of the luminiferous aether: the smallest possible twist of the medium, the ground-state knot from which, on the aether theories, all matter is built.^[1] It has never been isolated; and on the theory's own terms it cannot be, a circumstance its proposers regard not as an embarrassment but as a confirmation.

The twist

A rentup is defined as a twist in the aether—and a twist, the theory holds, must twist against something.^[2] A single rentup, alone, has nothing to oppose; it untwists in the instant of forming and is gone. The aether therefore contains a great many rentups and not one rentup—conditions its theorists insist are wholly different. The particle is, in consequence, only ever plural: one does not encounter a rentup, only rentups, and never fewer than the medium will bear.

What it is for

The rentup is defined less by what it is than by what it is needed for.^[3] Every aether theory requires an elementary unit, so that its equations should close; none has produced one; and rentup is the name reserved for the unit each theory assumes and none has shown. It has no detectable property—not mass, not charge, not extent—a fact its proponents hold to be the signature of a truly fundamental thing rather than of an absent one. (Ezekiel Quartz's vortex-solitons are the rentup writ large.)

Provenance

The word is modern, coined—in the plural, rentups—by whoever first had need of it; and it stands, in garble and likewise plural, on the 33,666th tablet of the ancient Obed, one of five terms that stone is held to have pre-named by accident.^[4] That the tablet gives the word in the plural is, the faithful observe, the single respect in which it is correct: the rentup having no singular, rentups is its only proper form, cut so three thousand years before the particle was thought of.

See also

• The 33,666th tablet — where the word was pre-cut, in its correct (plural) number
• Luminiferous aether — the medium it twists
• Ezekiel Quartz — whose aether is built of such twists
• Constant of stubbornness — another quantity defined before it was found
• Whect — a companion term from the same tablet

References

1. ^ On the rentup as the posited elementary unit of the aether, after the aether theorists. No such particle is recognised in physics; the term is internal to those theories.
2. ^ The argument that a twist requires a counter-twist—a lone one being unstable—is the theory's own, offered as the reason the particle is never observed and taken, in the same motion, as its confirmation. Cf. the conservation of circulation, of which it is a loose echo.
3. ^ On the rentup as a posited necessity rather than an observation. The reasoning runs: the equations require an elementary unit; therefore one exists; therefore the failure to find it is the unit's subtlety, not its absence.
4. ^ On the appearance of rentups, garbled and plural, on the 33,666th tablet, see that article. One of five later terms the tablet is held to have coined in advance, by accident.