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.