MIT builds camera that can capture at the speed of light (video) - Polidicks

[release] More than 70 years ago, the M.I.T. electrical engineer Harold (Doc) Edgerton began using strobe lights to create remarkable photographs: a bullet stopped in flight as it pierced an apple, the coronet created by the splash of a drop of milk. [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lingers-in-face-of-mit-media-lab-camera.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1323795610-Vh4HJhpP39cchI78UQ+Dfg"]Enlarge This Image[/URL] [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lingers-in-face-of-mit-media-lab-camera.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1323795610-Vh4HJhpP39cchI78UQ+Dfg"][IMG]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/12/13/science/13CAME/13CAME-articleInline.jpg[/IMG][/URL] [h=6]Di Wu and Andreas Velten, MIT Media Lab[/h][B]SLOW DOWN[/B] M.I.T.'s camera captures light particles seemingly in motion by using repeated exposures, creating a “movie” of a nanosecond-long event. [h=3]RSS Feed[/h][URL="http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Science.xml"][IMG]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/global/icons/rss.gif[/IMG] Get Science News From The New York Times »[/URL] Now scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab are using an[URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXgODHMWk"]ultrafast imaging system[/URL] to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second. The project began as a whimsical effort to literally see around corners — by capturing reflected light and then computing the paths of the returning light, thereby building images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible. “When I said I wanted to build a camera that looks around corners, my colleagues said, ‘Pick something that is more safe for your tenure,’ ” said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Lab. “Now I have tenure, so I can say this is not so crazy.” Dr. Raskar enlisted colleagues from the chemistry department to modify a “streak tube,” a supersensitive piece of laboratory equipment that scans and captures light. Streak tubes are generally used to intensify streams of photons into streams of electrons. They are fast enough to record the progress of packets of laser light fired repeatedly into a bottle filled with a cloudy fluid. The instrument is normally used to measure laboratory phenomena that take place in an ultra-short timeframe. Typically, it offers researchers information on intensity, position and wavelength in the form of data, not an image. By modifying the equipment, the researchers were able to create slow-motion movies, showing what appears to be a bullet of light that moves from one end of the bottle to the other. The pulses of laser light enter through the bottom and travel to the cap, generating a conical shock wave that bounces off the sides of the bottle as the bullet passes. The streak tube scans and captures light in much the same way a cathode ray tube emits and paints an image on the inside of a computer monitor. Each horizontal line is exposed for just 1.71 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, Dr. Raskar said — enough time for the laser beam to travel less than half a millimeter through the fluid inside the bottle. To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. Because each individual movie has a very narrow field of view, they repeat the process a number of times, scanning it vertically to build a complete scene that shows the beam moving from one end of the bottle, bouncing off the cap and then scattering back through the fluid. If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years. “You can think of it as slow motion,” Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral researcher who is a member of the design team, said during a recent technical presentation. “It is so much slow motion you can see the light itself move. This is the speed of light: there’s nothing in the universe that moves faster.” Dr. Raskar says the technology has a variety of promising commercial applications. Last year, for example, one of his graduate students, Jaewon Kim, published a thesis envisioning portable CAT-scanning devices. Dr. Raskar said he could also envision smartphone software that would capture and interpret reflections from, say, fruit. “Imagine if you have this in your phone about 10 years from now,” he said. “You will be able to go to your supermarket and tell if your fruit is ripe.” Until now, picosecond speeds have largely been the province of an elite group of scientists clustered at the nation’s weapons laboratories. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Gary Jones is an optical physicist who builds ultrafast imaging systems that help characterize the first microseconds of events like laser fusion and nuclear explosions. “To get a two-dimensional image within a picosecond means you have to have a lot of electronics moving really fast,” he said. For Dr. Raskar — who optimistically calls the project “femto photography,” using the term for [I]quadrillionths [/I]of a second — it is about more than just engineering or science. “We were inspired by looking at the world in a unique way just because we could,” he said. The system allows the naked eye to see information that has until now been rendered as data and charts. The proper analogy is to the way astronomers use instruments like radiotelescopes to create images with “fake” colors to see things in new ways — or to the original inspiration of Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century British photographer who achieved a new understanding of a horse’s gait by creating a camera array with electromagnetic shutters set off by tripwires. “We’re still trying to get our heads around what this means,” Dr. Raskar said, “because no one has been able to see the world in this way before.”[/release] [URL]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lingers-in-face-of-mit-media-lab-camera.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1323795610-Vh4HJhpP39cchI78UQ+Dfg[/URL] [video=youtube;EtsXgODHMWk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXgODHMWk&feature=player_embedded[/video]

Holy flying crap. That's pure awesome.

One step closer to being able to say "warp speed ahead!"

that has got to be the most amazing thing I have seen in a long time.

motherofgod.jpg [editline]13th December 2011[/editline] damn ninja

I always wondered what light looks like slowed down. Now I know, and it's as fucking awesome as i thought it would be.

I wish I knew how fast that light was moving because in the video it just looks like someone is slowly moving the light source. I was expecting to actually see the light particles in the air, not on the surface.

Im sorry but the video of the photons is probably the coolest thing i've ever seen.

How is it possible to see photons? They don't give off light or affect other photons, I am skeptical of this as it doesn't make sense, unless they simplified their terminology and made it easy to misinterpret.

Can you say Nobel Prize, anyone?

It's kinda misleading that he says he can see individual photon particles, when he meant a very short pulse of light. As far as I know, light photons cannot be observed or "seen" as an individual particle like they make it look in the video, even though it has properties of a particle.

If this isn't just some visual effect, but the actual light spreading, this will be the most awesome thing ever.

[QUOTE=Maucer;33703132]It's kinda misleading that he says he can see individual photon particles, when he meant a very short pulse of light. As far as I know, light photons cannot be observed or "seen" as an individual particle like they make it look in the video, even though it has properties of a particle.[/QUOTE] You got to remember as well that light doesn't have any mass. Without mass, I doubt it can have any kind of physical body. Light is a very tricky thing. It bounces, it passes through, it gets absorbed. It does a lot of funky things.

[QUOTE=Jurikuer;33703193]You got to remember as well that light doesn't have any mass. Without mass, I doubt it can have any kind of physical body. Light is a very tricky thing. It bounces, it passes through, it gets absorbed. It does a lot of funky things.[/QUOTE] Well from my point of view that's irrelevant. And even though it does not have a mass, it does have momentum. Being a particle does not exactly mean it has a "physical body". Electron is a particle too. But it's also definitely a wave in certain conditions. You cannot observe an individual electron circling around an atom. It's a sort of standing wave, and you kinda could say that the existence of the electron is waving. That's quantium mechanics.

Pretty fucking amazing. But now i feel like comitting suicide.. technology is becoming indistinguishable from magic. I was not born to see this..

[QUOTE=Holy-Smokes;33704192]technology is becoming indistinguishable from magic.[/QUOTE]Not possible. Magic doesn't exist so there is no way you could distinguish it from anything.

[QUOTE=Holy-Smokes;33704192]Pretty fucking amazing. But now i feel like comitting suicide.. technology is becoming indistinguishable from magic. I was not born to see this..[/QUOTE] It only seems like magic if you don't understand how it works. If you care to disillusion yourself, you could always read up on how stuff like this is accomplished. There is a wealth of information available to you on the internet.

Until it can be used to film watermelons exploding I'm not interested.

M. I. Motherfuckin' T

Fucking. Amazing.

[QUOTE=Thoughtless;33703011]How is it possible to see photons? They don't give off light or affect other photons, I am skeptical of this as it doesn't make sense, unless they simplified their terminology and made it easy to misinterpret.[/QUOTE] Photons [b]are[/b] light

What if he aimed this camera into a mirror and took a picture? It would cause a rift in space and time.

[QUOTE=cecilbdemodded;33705046]What if he aimed this camera into a mirror and took a picture? It would cause a rift in space and time.[/QUOTE] No it'd just create a terrible visual artifact.

[QUOTE=Jurikuer;33702963]I wish I knew how fast that light was moving because in the video it just looks like someone is slowly moving the light source. I was expecting to actually see the light particles in the air, not on the surface.[/QUOTE] ~3x10^8 m/s

[QUOTE=Thoughtless;33703011]How is it possible to see photons? They don't give off light or affect other photons, I am skeptical of this as it doesn't make sense, unless they simplified their terminology and made it easy to misinterpret.[/QUOTE] The camera only captures the photons which hit the scene and bounce into its objective, but since they progressively go further through the scene and bounce to the camera, you get to see them propagating if you capture fast enough. [editline]13th December 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Jurikuer;33702963]I wish I knew how fast that light was moving because in the video it just looks like someone is slowly moving the light source. I was expecting to actually see the light particles in the air, not on the surface.[/QUOTE] You can't "see" light until it hits a sensor or your retina.

[QUOTE=Dark-Energy;33704999]Photons [B]are[/B] light[/QUOTE] I think he meant how do they observe the light beam, because eyes's and camera's vision is based on observing the light that's reflected or emitted of an objects surface. But I bet in this case they see the beam due to scattering, the same reason why we see laser beams and blue sky. If there was a vacuum, they wouldn't see it.

[QUOTE=Dark-Energy;33704999]Photons [b]are[/b] light[/QUOTE] If you managed to capture a photon (impossible I know, but it's the easiest way to explain this), no matter how much light you shone on it you would never see any effects on the oncoming light, so no machine could detect non-incident photons without affecting them, This is the principle that quantum computing is based on. [editline]13th December 2011[/editline] Also Photons are the particles that make up light, but you only get light if there is enough of them to make a stream of photons.

They are technically cheating. They don't record travel of single light pulse, but instead they record a different phase of multiple pulses, which are virtually identical, so it produces an image similar to the real deal, but it isn't, really. Cool, nonetheless.

That's fucking amazing!!!! There's so many applications of this!

Science is [I]so[/I] awesome these days!