This is more impressive than previous claims of trillion FPS cameras, because it captures it all sequentially from a single event. Other such claims were based on capturing one frame at a time of a repeating event with different time delays.
I'm confused how you could film a light pulse this way. It seems that the light pulse would itself have to be emitting light somehow. I'll assume it was travelling through a gas that scattered it.
I'd be curious to see the dual-slit experiment done using this camera as the "observer".<p>I'm not sure it'd yield anything we don't already "know" - but it might be worth trying just because.
> <i>The imaging system captures a light pulse (in a slowed video)</i><p>I like that they remind us that the video is slowed down and that time doesn't actually move at 10 picoseconds per second.
This article caused me to remember something I heard on a Youtube video and wanted to follow up on. Essentially, is there (and if so what is) the framerate of the universe? It makes logical sense to have a minimum bundle of time based on Planck's constant, so I did some googling and found the answer (I have not checked this math)[1]:<p>> <i>The Planck time is 5.39 × 10-44 seconds. No measurable time can be shorter than that according to quantum physics.</i><p>Converting to FPS, that gives us:<p>> <i>One thousand eight hundred and fifty-five billion billion billion billion frames per second. 18.55 septillion FPS!</i><p>So if like me you wondered if a trillion FPS is close to the maximum possible frame rate in the universe, the answer is nope!<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.librador.com/2009/01/16/The-frame-rate-of-the-universe/" rel="nofollow">http://www.librador.com/2009/01/16/The-frame-rate-of-the-uni...</a>
CalTech films light at the speed of 10 trillion frames a second! The "Slow Mo Guys" went to caltech to take a look: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ</a>
I'm blown away by this. If I'm understanding this correctly, this picture[1] is light traveling for a distance of about 3/8ths of an inch.<p>[1] <a href="https://media.nature.com/w800/magazine-assets/d41586-019-01625-5/d41586-019-01625-5_16737810.gif" rel="nofollow">https://media.nature.com/w800/magazine-assets/d41586-019-016...</a>
I wonder how the authors feel that their work is so good that the website for Nature has a piece on it but not good enough to be published in a Nature journal.
So, looking at the video, I am curious: is there a video where they fire a light impulse against a double-slit experiment setup? Would it be possible to see the light being "split up" and interfering with itself?
Can anybody comment on what is meant by a "frame" here?<p>My intuition tells me that what we consider a "frame" in our daily experience (24 up through maybe 144) would be pretty different from what this "frame" would be, in terms of how it is captured and how it is subsequently rendered.<p>Any ideas?
This technology could give us the opportunity to verify a ton of our physical and chemical models with direct observation. The demo may not be exciting but if they can scale it down you can expect a lot of exciting discoveries. I can't wait to see what we're wrong about.
> <i>The imaging system captures a light pulse (in a slowed video)</i><p>Good to know that's not the actual speed of light!<p>Anyway, it looks like the photons are "crawling" by their patterns of speed, rather than traveling at a fixed speed.
I've had conversations with a guy who works at one of the companies that makes high-speed cameras. One of the interesting thing to come out of those conversations is that below a certain threshold of frame duration (which is related to, but not necessarily the recriprocal of the frame rate) a camera with that capability becomes subject to ITAR, because supposedly said camera could be used to develop nuclear weapons.<p>My intuition is that the camera described in this article would be subject to ITAR were it developed in a western nation. But, I doubt China gives any fucks about that.