Brian Haidt, a scientist who is making videos on YouTube under the handle alphaphoenixA new video shows a camera Can capture footage of a laser pointer at the speed of light. The camera is an update to a previous design that can capture footage at a billion frames per second, but it comes with a major caveat: It can only shoot one pixel at a time.
Hadet’s camera consists of a gimbal-mounted mirror, two tubes, a simple lens, a light sensor, and some Python code. Pointed at a laser pointer, the camera is capable of capturing a beam of light at two billion frames per second, which shows it traveling smoothly between mirrors, the speed depending on where the camera is in relation to the laser pointer. “The light moves about six inches or 15 centimeters per frame of this video,” Haidt says. “This beam of light is traveling at the speed limit of the universe. Light in any reference frame will never travel faster or slower than this speed.”
Pixels had to be tiled together to resemble normal video footage.
(Brian Haidt)
While it’s theoretically possible to build a more conventional camera that can capture footage at two billion frames per second, as Haidt points out, you can’t do it with the equipment most people have in their garages. Their solution was to capture one pixel at a time, and then tile that footage together to create something viewable. According to Haidt, “If all these videos are synchronized and we take many, many, many, one pixel videos, we can tile these videos next to each other and play them all back at the exact moment and give something that looks like one video.”
While this isn’t the same as a true two billion frames-per-second camera, “It’s a fairly expensive way to do it,” Haidt says, “and it really won’t give us any better results.”
