If you thought slow-mo videos of watermelons being exploded by bullets and chubby, jowled faces recoiling from slaps was as good as it gets, think again: MIT Media Lab has created a camera-and-laser rig that’s capable of capturing one trillion exposures per second; fast enough to visualize the speed of light and to see the effect of individual photons as they collide with surfaces.
This new camera uses a new technology called a streak camera, which uses a narrow slit as its aperture. One of the system’s developers, Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, says its the “ultimate” in slow motion. Explaining “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,”.
Particles of light — photons — enter the camera through the slit and pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects late-arriving photons more than it does early-arriving ones.
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