14 December 2011
Slowing Down A Light Beam With A Camera That Shoots A Trillion Frames Per Second
Posted by Dan Satterfield
There is an amazing video out tonight on YouTube from the MIT Media Lab. They’ve developed a camera that can make an exposure of only two trillionths of a second! We all know light travels about 300,000 km each second, and that breaks down to about 300 meters in a millionth of a second. This means it’s possible with this camera to make a movie of a light beam moving across a tomato!
In essence the movie here is made up of 500 billion frames per second!
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.
Be sure to click on the link to the MIT Media Lab to see the video of a light pulse moving through a coke bottle. Fascinating!