AMP was founded with the vision that publishers can create mobile-optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere. Now widely available, the AMP experience has been likened to magic (some have called it “yesterday fast”). We felt it was time to take a deep dive into how AMP works at a subatomic level. It isn’t magic, it’s physics.
We knew that the secret to fast-loading pages was contained in the pages themselves, but the heaviest page elements have always been tightly bound by high-energy scripts that thread through nearly every line of code, making it nearly impossible to determine the essential parts of a page.
That was before the construction of the Very Large Mobile Page Accelerator (VLMPA), a massive and specialized machine for exploring the mysterious article physics of the mobile information space.
In the VLMPA, two beam pipes containing mobile web pages gradually accelerate their atomic units of content to equal and opposite speeds of 0.999999999c (only about 0.7 mph slower than the speed of light) and collide them with one another. Detectors around the point of collision analyze the burst of elementary articles that result from this explosive impact. Tracing the paths of these phenomena with the VLMPA will allow us to uncover clues to the nature of dark content, pursue the origins of mass media in all its dimensions, and investigate what happens to spurious antimatter, otherwise known as the misinformation space.
Findings
After only a few months of running the VLMPA, the sheer volume of findings has surprised and inspired us.
One of the biggest challenges for the web is the presence of particularly heavy elements. Their gravitational attraction can lead to various and strange quantum effects, including the total collapse of a page over its event horizon. In our research we found that large electromagnets can counter the phenomenon in most cases, though high energy usage remains a problem.
Of particular note, our research shows that web pages are in fact made up of many tiny, one-dimensional strings, effectively putting an end to decades-long discussions about string theory.
So what can we actually do with this research capability? Our findings have already taught us a lot about how to confront the binary chaos of the mobile web. Now we can put that knowledge into practice.
For instance, we now freeze AMPs to near 0 degrees Kelvin before putting them on the wire, dramatically reducing the friction of the bytes when they pass through a tiny 2G connection. We also now use the new Content Ambiguity Toolkit (🐱) to defer collapsing a page element’s quantum waveform until just before it is within the viewport. We can address the age-old question: if the page element is never scrolled to, does it exist at all? Now, it can effectively remain both loaded and not-loaded—a huge savings in bandwidth.
The Future
So, whats next? Over the coming months we plan to feed increasingly heavy portable content units into the accelerator. Some theorists suggest the collision of 2 pages above 6,000 EeV (6×1024 electron-volts, or the amount of energy required to transport 20 MB of data from the equator to geostationary orbit) would result in a very small black hole. This is unlikely, and we’re confident that any singularity, if created, would be visually unobtrusive to most users. Please follow our Twitter account for updates.
And this is just the beginning. We’re close to getting answers to some of the most burning questions about web technology, including insights into the lo-on, a hypothetical particle believed to have existed only briefly in the moments after the web itself was born.
However, not everyone agrees that the most important particle in this search is the lo-on:
“Actually, when the web was born, a gigantic explosion of bogons filled the metaverse, polluting the web with vast quantities of expression, leaving Internauts with the task of sorting fact from fantasy,” explains internet pioneer Vint Cerf.
We look forward to the exciting discoveries VLMPA has yet to surface. We hope you’ll be accelerating with us.
Posted by AMP Project Research Group
Exploring theoretical article physics—all in good humor—since April 1, 2016