Trillon frames/second - truly seeing light

[surfstar]

Don't think this has been posted yet:

A trillon frames per second TED video

All I can say is wow. Pretty awesome to actually see light waves.

 

[simple_gifts]

Very interesting. TED talks are a great diversion from a daily routine.

 

[97prizm]

Wow that is really cool

 

[Shannow]

That's pretty flash.

Thanks for posting it.

 

[GMBoy]

Cool! Thanks for sharing. Wonder how many years until that technology trickles down to our personal cameras?

 

[JimPghPA]

From Wikipedia:

For context, a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 31.7 million years.

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Or to put it another way, in one femtosecond light travels about 0.00001 inches.

 

[Pop_Rivit]

Incredible stuff-thanks for posting it.

 

[Klutch9]

Absolutely phenomenal. It's amazing to even begin to try to understand how much time has to be slowed down in order to see light waves. Mind-boggling...

 

[Klutch9]

Originally Posted By: JimPghPA
From Wikipedia:

For context, a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 31.7 million years.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Or to put it another way, in one femtosecond light travels about 0.00001 inches.


According to my quick calculations, the distance traveled by light in one femtosecond is even smaller; about 1/1.859 x 10 to the 14th of an inch

I double checked my math, but it's really late, so...

 

[Crashbox]

Brilliant!

 

[JimPghPA]

They missed the mark (pun intended). It would even be more interesting if they shot it with the bullet tip about to touch the apple just to show how much the bullet does not move during the entire clip of the light going through the bottle of water.

 

[JimPghPA]

Originally Posted By: Klutch9
Originally Posted By: JimPghPA
From Wikipedia:

For context, a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 31.7 million years.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Or to put it another way, in one femtosecond light travels about 0.00001 inches.


According to my quick calculations, the distance traveled by light in one femtosecond is even smaller; about 1/1.859 x 10 to the 14th of an inch

I double checked my math, but it's really late, so...


Speed of light is aproximately 300,000 Kilometers per second.

One Femtosecond is 1 x 10^-15 of a second.

300,000 Kilometers x (1 x 10^-15) = 300 nanometers

300 nanometers = 1.18 x 10^-5 inches

round that off to 1 x 10^-5 inches = 0.00001 inches

 

[JimPghPA]

I remember when I learned milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, atto, and it was said that in one femtosecond light traveled about 1/3 the distance of the diameter of a human hair.

However a search on google for the diameter of a human hair varies from 0.004 inches to 0.0002 inches, so in a femtosecond light travels about 1/20 the distance of the diameter of the thinnest human hair, and about 1/400 the distance of the thickest human hair.

 

[chevrofreak]

The images are spectacular, but the method of creating (yes, creating, not capturing them) takes away a lot of their "achievement" in my eyes.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: chevrofreak
The images are spectacular, but the method of creating (yes, creating, not capturing them) takes away a lot of their "achievement" in my eyes.


Sorry, I'm stunned at the "achievement".

Was at the Oz war memorial the other day, and showing the children the radar unit in the aircraft enclosure. Single trace on a CRO, giving time and size information, the angle of the antenna the direction.

To create a photon pulse of that size is incredible.

To be able to resolve the time to a point that a photon flash can be reckoned back to a reflection event is amazing.

Guess that electron microscopy leaves you cold too ?

 

[Turk]

We do something similar at work, that's about all I can say for now.

If our funding comes in, there will be a huge medical shift, I just can't say much now.

 

[Propflux01]

I guess that pretty much 'proves' the actual speed of light.

 

[Shannow]

It proves it at that frame of reference.

Was interested in the effect of the ripples running the wrong way, and whether that's indicative of a quantum aspect to time.

 

[JimPghPA]

Originally Posted By: JimPghPA
They missed the mark (pun intended). It would even be more interesting if they shot it with the bullet tip about to touch the apple just to show how much the bullet does not move during the entire clip of the light going through the bottle of water.


This is assuming that the entire clip was of the same pulse of light. It is possible that each frame was shot with a new time delay from the initiation of a new pulse of light. And if it was acquired that way then the bullet comparison would not be valid, though with the times involved, it still might be possible to shoot the entire clip with the bullet appearing to stand still, even if a new pulse of light was used for each frame, as long as there was not a significant delay between frames.

 

[Samilcar]

Originally Posted By: Shannow

Guess that electron microscopy leaves you cold too ?


Electron microscopy captures actual images. The technique shown in the video builds an image using software that has computed what the image would actually look like.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/ramesh_raskar.html

"...they built a camera and software that can visualize pictures as if they are recorded at 1 trillion frames per second"

Key words being "visualize" and "as if". I'm not saying that it isn't cool stuff, but it's not actual images being captured at 1 trillion frames per second, just what the software computes those virtual images as looking like at 1 trillion frames per second.