Establish whether wave substrates reduce the rent constant

Determine whether any optical, wave-based, or other propagating-signal storage substrate can achieve a rent constant genuinely below the electronic band, rather than merely relocating the cost to attenuation compensation and boundary transduction.

Background

The paper identifies storage in flight as a potential challenge to its rent law. Optical and wave substrates may keep information as propagating signals, for which the relevant cost is not conventional leakage during storage but regeneration to compensate for attenuation and transduction at boundaries.

The unresolved question is whether such substrates can genuinely lower the rent constant relative to electronic storage, or whether their apparent advantage is only a relabeling of equivalent physical costs. The paper presents this as a particularly sharp empirical test of the proposed law.

References

Delay-line memory, our machine's own ancestor, paid exactly that rent; whether any wave substrate achieves a rent constant genuinely below the electronic band, rather than relabeling it, is open, and is the sharpest test the law could face.

— The Price of Remembering: A Calibrated Energy Law for Computation  (2609.00744 - Bergach, 1 Sep 2026) in Section 8, “Testing the Law,” paragraph beginning “The counterexample surface is equally explicit”