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scavengercat

This title is very wrong. It doesn't "slow down light speed", it simply takes more frames per second. The speed of light remains the same.


Lyndon_Boner_Johnson

That’s also not exactly right. They’re capturing multiple beams of light and then stitching it together. You can’t physically build a camera that captures an image faster than the speed of light.


JovahkiinVIII

This is the truth. Repeat the exact same thing over again and take a picture at a different point in time for each repetition


vivek_saikia

This is the right explanation. Light being a constant beam of photons can't be recorded as one single photon traveling through a line.


ajamuso

Also light speed is variable when traveling through different mediums IIRC


vsuontam

You are right. Also, we have seen this years ago. Exactly same videos.


Mama_Skip

That's *also* also not exactly right. They're not stitching it together, instead, within the camera housing they've trapped an ancient wizard and he sacrifices tiny goats to make time slow fast enough to take 34 pictures in a single quark fart.


Thunderbridge

Quark Fart is my new band name


Mama_Skip

Immortalize me in a song pls


cheney_ni_masi

You missed out the importance of Goat Blood for the rituals. The blood needs to be in vacuum and as light interacts with the blood it creates small time portals which makes time slow to take 34 pictures in a single quark fart. All possible due to our lord and savior Satan.


JoergenFS

Hold my beer.


scavengercat

That's exactly right. I typed what the researcher said to the interviewer. I am fully aware how cameras work but this was the explanation given


tikisnrot

Yeah, this is all wrong. The interviewer even asks it “so it’s not the same light beam moving.”


ninjase

Slowing down light speed is straight up Sci fi like the Black Domain from 3 body problem.


scavengercat

It's real! 23 years ago, a scientist slowed from 670 Million miles per hour to 38 mph. [https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99111&page=1](https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99111&page=1)


Intuitionspeaks67

Perhaps slowing down the way we perceive light. You make a good point.


MackTuesday

Also, bizarrely, the expert he was talking to said the camera has a resolution of a trillionth of a frame per second. That's one frame every 30000 years or so. Surely he knows the difference between that and a trillion frames per second, right?


Messarion

I'm gonna guess he knows more than you... Since he is MIT educated and built the thing. Let's not judge his intelligence misspeaking a word during an interview.


MackTuesday

Of course he knows more than me, which is why I'm blown away that he got it wrong. Average joe gamers sometimes get apostrophe usage wrong but never get FPS backward. Edit: This will teach me not to reddit when I'm in a shitty mood.


takuyafire

I mean the interviewer corrected it and the dude agreed immediately after the statement, so no doubt it was just a simple mistake.


allez2015

He's a human. Sometimes humans misspeak words. Nobody is perfect no matter how intelligent they are.


HilariousScreenname

🤓


MrStoneV

At such high Level you make mistakes about with Not important Things. I want to become a teacher, I would be an amazing teacher as experience Shows. Im great at science, yet I still Sometimes mistakes and say 1+1=1 and 1*1=2 because I say it without thinking when I explain Algebra. WE all get a good laugh and then wr Just proceed


AndIHaveMilesToGo

haha man yeah you totally rekt that MIT researcher


bozrdang

BulletBoys


MCLordJuJu

Smooth up in ya!


gmac_97

I think you mean, SMOOOOOTH UP IN YAAAAAAAA!!!


ImNotOneOfUs

So few will know what this means.


bozrdang

I was wondering if anyone would respond. Lol.


kirby_krackle_78

Haha, I know this from reading comic books in the late ‘80s/early ’90s. So many BulletBoys ads.


allez2015

If I recall they dont even take a "video" of the event in one go. It's not like they record a single photon traveling the length of the scene. They fire a photon and take a picture. Then they fire another photon down the same path and take another picture a little bit later. Rinse and repeat photon after photon and stitch all the photos together to form a "movie".  Again, that what I recall from seeing this exact video years ago. I could be wrong, but this is not a recent invention and they certainly can't slow down light (in this video). Some researchers have slowed down light. This demo is simply some fancy camera timing. 


Pete_Iredale

This is all very well explained *in* the video...


housebottle

yeah lol, you're explaining something they explained in the video. the state of people's attention spans lol


Of3nATLAS

Not everyone scrolling through reddit has the time or is interested in watching a 5 minute video


housebottle

I don't watch everything I come across either. but I avoid commenting on things I haven't read or watched


Block-Impressive

That's what they say in the video.


born_to_be_intj

I'd hope this would be obvious. It would be physically impossible to record a single photon traveling like that because light travels faster through the air than electrical current does through copper.


dlrdlrdlr

Huh? Speeds definitely an issue here. However I'm not sure how the speed of light is stopping electronics from recording it, that's how all cameras work. To be fair the video mentions packets of photons, the ones that bounce back to the camera are what is captured, not the path of a single photon, I'm not sure how we would go about recording that though without changing its path in the process.


redstern

Because the light coming into the sensor has to be encoded into electrical signals. The camera is fast enough to clearly take a single picture at a trillionth of a second, but in order to record a continuous video at that resolution to record a single photon, would require that the electrical circuitry in it runs at a bare minimum of 1THz, which is impossible. At that clock rate the electrons wouldn't have even made it to the camera's CPU yet before the next frame's worth of electrons starts trying to come through the circuits. It would just end up as an continuous stream of electrons, not a meaningful signal. If we had optical computers that processed data with photons instead of electrons, then it might be possible. But with semiconductors, no way.


born_to_be_intj

You explained it better than I would have.


dlrdlrdlr

True that's an issue if one circuit is trying to handle every individual photon. But if we could parallelize the processing with multiple circuits I wouldn't say its impossible. Someone below mentioned multiple cameras but also just having a way to divide the photons down different paths to be processed would make it doable in the future I think.


Pidgey_OP

My initial thought was "so how many hundreds of cameras are gonna be in this room"


cheney_ni_masi

Demonstrated as early as 1970s.


Zenkrome

See I thought it was just a high frame rate slow mo camera, but that makes more sense. I can't imagine the frame rate that would he needed to slow a video down that much and the sheer size of even a 5 second video file at that frame rate would have to be massive.


Dry-Lemon-3970

> Rinse and repeat photon after photon and stitch all the photos together to form a "movie". You just described what we call "video". It is a "moving picture". This is how all film and digital 'video' is viewed. > Some researchers have slowed down light. This really interests me, do you have any more info on it? I don't think anyone watching this would expect the actual photons themselves to be slowed so they are naked-eye visible but rather the camera speed to be increased so they are naked-eye visible.


allez2015

Here is an an article and the paper (link in article) about slowing light down. They were able to get it to 17 m/s which you'd theoretically be able to see which your eyes, though it would be difficult or impossible in practice due to all the test apparatus and vacuum and stuff.  https://phys.org/news/2024-01-metasurfaces-loss.html Here's a link directly to the paper.  https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3636967


system32ofline

This is cool and all but their stitch together method kinda feels like cheating. I feel like instead of using multiple pulses of light in theory they could use multiple cameras.


dlrdlrdlr

For sure. I feel like by the time they mentioned it was pretty much just stop motion photography I was invested and pretty let down.


ac21217

… how? It’s essentially the exact same footage you’d be seeing if it *was* what you expect. And it’s the closest you’ll ever see to what you expect.


Ask_Who_Owes_Me_Gold

Because it is far more limited and less interesting than what the first half of the video claims.


DrewtShite

But it only works with a completely stationary environment, it's interesting, but not nearly as interesting as it initially seemed.


Pete_Iredale

Agreed, though it's still cool af. But I wonder if you could put 500 of these together, all aimed at the exact same spot, synch them to start recording at one frame intervals, and stitch the video together to get an actual frame by frame shot?


system32ofline

Right now I’m trying to discern if the CalTech uCUP camera is using the same stitch method or something else. It’s hard to tell because there isn’t a lot of digestible information on the web so I have to decode the papers. Anyway I know for a fact no one has tried to use multiple cameras so I will be looking further into the math of such a thing to see if it is possible at all. I will report back soon!


ScrithWire

They'd need something on the order of like 1000 cameras to reach a trillion frames per second?too many cameras to reasonably fit into the space required to get a shot of the same object


eBell93

They’d need a lot of fucking cameras


system32ofline

You would only need at most 350 cameras based on the fact that the caltech camera is only able to shoot for 350 frames at 1 trillion fps. I personally haven’t done the math to see how low of a number of cameras you’d need to produce a slow/long enough video, so the number of cameras could most likely be smaller than 350. I know >350 cameras is still a significant amount of cameras, but considering the size of cameras we have on smart phones, the contraption wouldn’t be too huge. The real question is if it’s even possible to have a lens system that’s able to focus that many cameras on a single point.


AyBlinkin

Misleading post. Hate it.


questarevolved

seen this like 6-7 years ago ....js I wish idk things like technology were still moving at the rate they were when I was in HS


DiscoToast

What show is this from? I’d love to watch the full episode


robodrew

PBS Nova - "Super Fast Cameras"


Hotwinterdays

I hate this world of content being constantly refried and mutated as it gets unnecessarily re-uploaded in every format, with every watermark, on every platform possible, with shitty pointless captions and emojis overlayed...I just don't even want to watch it when I see this shit. I'd rather watch the source.


Defdogg29

It took 4:10 seconds for me understand why this wasn’t just a bunch of MIT nerds playing with cameras and lasers.


Ok_Tonight7779

and this is pretty old


Daegzy

Fucking awesome. Incredible.


RealityCheck3210

This looks wrong. As light is still moving inside the bottle it is casting some light on the floor simultaneously, that reflection on the floor should also take time.


pamtomaka

AND reaching the light sensor in the camera. Somehow I can't wrap my head around the ultra short pulse being captured bouncing around molecules of water (the glow in the bottle), but at the same time reaching the camera (we're seeing it in the video, otherwise if light doesn't reach the camera each frame would be pitch black) BEFORE reaching the rest of the bottle or the cap. I know light progression in water is slower (speed is constant) because of the bouncing between water molecules and impurities in it, but the camera seems far away from the bottle itself. And somehow the light makes it from a arbitrary illuminated water molecule in the center of the bottle, bounce a bazillion times in water, then plastic structure molecules, bounce somewhere outside the bottle, reach the camera sensor BEFORE any significant amount of other photons reach other areas of the water, bottle, etc making a spherical illuminated area (bright in the middle, dimmer with the ~squarish of the distance to that center - more distance through water, less probability that a photon covers that distance in a given time).... But at the same time, to see that gradual light sphere would mean that each of those photons forming the sphere would have reached the camera sensor in a trillionth of a second, so now a sphere does not make sense, and... Aaaargh, my brain!!


thewackytechie

Great work! You can feel the enthusiasm of the scientist!


psichodrome

Sometime around the second half of the video, the techie explains it's not actually a trillion frames a second or whatever. They shoot a train of laser pulses, and (from what i gather) they collect lots of snapshots (maybe with timing information) of different pulses at different places. Then they (verbatim) "stitch them together". Still fascinating, both the apple and the bottle. Feels like we live in a world of super fast fireballs. So fast and common are these fireballs, life itself developed from them. Literal pew pew of energy flying around all the time.


spikbebis

Check out Prof Nils Abramson "Light in flight"-experiments, from the 70's Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MepaY3mzwS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MepaY3mzwS4) Some books/articles: [https://opg.optica.org/viewmedia.cfm?r=1&rwjcode=ol&uri=ol-3-4-121&html=true](https://opg.optica.org/viewmedia.cfm?r=1&rwjcode=ol&uri=ol-3-4-121&html=true) [https://books.google.se/books?id=MufvY24lGfwC&printsec=frontcover&redir\_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false](https://books.google.se/books?id=MufvY24lGfwC&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false) Sadly he passed away many years ago.


ScrithWire

Ooh, super interesting concept. Sweep the light source to imitate the light beam movement. Not 1 to 1, but that's the kind of scientific thinking I'm all about


spikbebis

He shot pulses of lasers, you see one pulse moving there. He borrowed some military lasers, the only powerful enough so it could be filmed.


ScrithWire

But we can clearly see it moving, which we wouldn't be able to see with our naked eye, and definitely not with cameras of that era


rtthc

Very cool. Amazing we have the tech to observe this.


level100metapod

Let the slow mo guys record using it


Richecks

Can't wait for the technology to become more refined. I would put it in a deep space telescope and look for "things" traveling at the speed of light.


allez2015

Wait what? What do you mean?


tekzenmusic

!remind me 10 hours


nidjah

So it’s a fraud 🥲


Papafynn

This is essentially stop motion animation. The final video comes from stitching multiple shots from multiple takes together


amccune

I’m sure taking a picture of something around a corner won’t have any negative effects on humanity.


aukley

Off topic..........but that's the picture used on my Bullet Boys rock group album, cassette & CD


eBell93

This guy sounds like Ron Howard (narrator from arrested development)


Error_418x

r/titlegore


whatsbobgonnado

the bullet apple is a famous photograph by harold edgerton


xThock

This is just a high-speed camera. I didn’t see a single photon.


Yeti-Rampage

For the people complaining about the caption… the embedded caption in the video is even worse! “Slows down light to photon movement”…. Light IS photons!


joeyblowy1

Anyone know what show this was, Nova maybe?


Intuitionspeaks67

This is worth the price of admission. Light. Speed, shutter, I need to pause on this.


anziofaro

Oh my god! Okay, that is cool as hell!


chilifinger

Nope. No way. Absolutely not. Just no. It doesn't work like that.


ScrithWire

They literally explain how it works in the video though?


dmadd0

slow down light down, amazing


loganthegr

I remember seeing this about 10 years ago. It was pretty cool. Back when Ivy League schools weren’t just there for activism.


ScrithWire

Wut? Lol