What a laser pointer at 2 billion FPS looks like



    by ansyhrrian

    22 Comments

    1. Evening_Rock5850 on

      I’m aware, conceptually, that light is a thing that moves from point A to point B. But it’s so freaking cool to see light ‘moving’ like this.

      Relativity is also mind blowing. Because we can slow this down immensely to see the light moving; but the light itself, if it was some sentient being that could experience things; would not experience that movement or any real sense of time. Moving AT the speed of light it’s simply in all of those places at the same time. And I don’t mean “because it’s brain can’t comprehend those speeds”. I mean because time and space basically don’t exist from the perspective of something traveling at the speed of light. It’s everywhere it’s ever been and everywhere it’ll be and nowhere all at the same time.

    2. Can someone explain to me how something works faster than light? Is it because this light is not in a vacuum?

    3. That’s only three zigzags, very short laser burst. With a laser pointer?

      Or what did i get wrong?

    4. Sea-Flamingo1969 on

      Wait, doesn’t light move slower through a medium like air? Wouldn’t that mean it can go faster than this through a vacuum

    5. BoxAccomplished8879 on

      These videos of capturing light moving have been popping up here and there but man I’m still fascinated by this it’s so damn sic to see the fastest thing ever move at a trackable speed

    6. If you want to see that counter reach 1.0000000000 second, it would take 63 years. 5 months. (and 1 day)

    7. This is awesome, the video documenting his camera build is really out of the box thinking. The camera takes “video” of a single pixel at 2 billion frames. He fires the laser 2 million times shifting the sensor 1 pixel at a time, and then builds the entire image from that.

    8. so if I understand it correctly, the light of that beam is moving towards the camera from every point of that beam (through reflection from air particles?), otherwise we would not be able to see it

    9. Wish they did it on a laboratory other than a garage. Also it would take more than a year(s) to watch 1 second, depending on the FPS playback.

    10. TheBrianWeissman on

      The photons spraying off the central beam and then ricocheting off the walls to slowly illuminate the scene are such a fascinating part of this video. I always feel a thrill seeing things this novel, things our ancestors couldn’t have ever even conceived, much less enjoyed.

    11. it is not traveling at the universes speed limit, it is slower, the universes speed limit is higher in the vacuum of space

    12. What confuses me the most about this is that the light also needs to hit the camera sensor. So if this was taken further away I’m guessing you’d barely see this at all?

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