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Am I Reading This Right?

December 8, 2014, 8:50 am

This seems to claim to be able to take photos fast enough to capture the movement of light.  Is that really possible?  Reminds me of watching sunrise on Discworld.

Tags:
Category: Science

4 Comments

  1. jon49:

    See EmilLily's comment:

    First, the claim that "This high speed camera track light bouncing off a Mirror" is a LIE.

    This camera only track processes that take place in the gas when through it passes laser pulse. These processes are much slower than the speed at which light moves....

    December 8, 2014, 9:21 am

  2. mikehaseler:

    They were doing something very similar some 30 years ago at my University. The process is simple - just have a very narrow time window and keep repeating it.

    December 8, 2014, 1:30 pm

  3. Andrew_M_Garland:

    Light travels about 300 million meters/second, = .3 m in a billionth of a second (about 1 foot), = .003 m when a camera takes 100 billion pictures/second. That is 3 mm, about 1/8th inch.

    Say you emit a pulse of light for 1 billionth of a second from a laser, from left to right. The pulse is about 1 foot long. Say it travels through thin smoke, enough particles in the air to reflect some of the light to the side toward the 100 billion/second camera. Then, each frame would show the light pulse advancing another 1/8th inch toward the right.

    December 8, 2014, 3:08 pm

  4. sch:

    Under the right circumstances such as a Bose-Einstein plasma or a suitable stacked media you can slow down photons to
    centimeters per second. Remember light travels at "lightspeed" only in a vacuum. Any interaction with matter or charged
    particles can slow photons down. The speed of light through glass is inversely proportional the the refractive index.

    December 9, 2014, 10:08 am