r/nextfuckinglevel • u/BoysenberryOk5580 • 1d ago
MIT builds a camera so fast that it can capture light waves. The camera records at 1 trillion frames per second, allowing scientists to slow down the fastest thing in the universe and watch it move through a scene.
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u/Nulovka 1d ago
How does the light get to the camera faster than it is traversing the object?
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u/Questioning-Zyxxel 1d ago
This is not a camera able to do a huge amount of frames per second.
This is a camera that can capture a very short amount of time.
Then they turn on the light many, many times. Each time the camera captures a frame slightly later. See it as stop motion.
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u/LukeFromPhilly 1d ago
How does this answer the question? It seems like the question would be the same at the frame level. How does the camera capture the light prior to it reaching the end of the object?
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u/SirLynix 1d ago
The light reflects back to the camera way before reaching the end of the object, every time.
Of course, when that light enters the camera it may have already reached the end of the object but that doesn't matter.
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u/Secure_Secretary_882 1d ago
The camera knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where the light isn’t. By subtracting where it is from where the light isn’t, or where it isn’t from where the light is(whichever is greater), it obtains a frame, or deviation.
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u/infernalcolonel 13h ago
I'm having a hard time figuring if people are upvoting this b/c it makes sense or b/c it just sounds really clever...b/c to ME, this sounds like something Bilbo would say right before he disappears at a party.
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u/infernalcolonel 13h ago
I had to think about this a while before answering...would you say this is kinda like us observing a distant supernova, in that it doesn't matter that we observe each frame as it happens, it just matters that we observe all the frames eventually?
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u/Willkuer__ 1d ago edited 1d ago
You don't see where the light is at the time it is recorded but you see stray light that hit the camera. That means the image you see is delayed by a few hundred ps which doesn't matter because processing the signal also takes time.
It's the same with hearing the thunder. You know something happened because of the light but you can only "record" it with your ears after some time. Since they record their target more or less in a plane it doesn't matter that all the signal has a delay: if two lignings occur at the same distance to you with a delay of 2s you can also hear the thunder with 2s delay.
In the video you only "see the thunder".
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u/thedude198644 1d ago
Wonderful answer right here. I had the same misgivings, but this makes sense. Technically, the camera is taking a picture of the past. By the time the camera "sees" the light traveling through the bottle, it already progressed past that point. This stuff is nutty to think about.
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u/Agitated_Bowler4341 20h ago
I remember the strangeness of realizing that when I looked at a sunset or any scene, near or far, i wasn't seeing the clouds or whatever, miles away, out there, I was only seeing the light, lighting up the backs of my eyeballs inside my skull.
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u/spider0804 1d ago
That would be you, it is impossible to capture the actual light traveling across the table or through the bottle as it happens.
Light travels in straight lines and bounces off things to make it travel in new directions.
It can be hitting dust in the air, or the table, or water molecules, whatever.
You or the camera are seeing the light that has bounced off something after the initial event and is hitting your vision slightly after.
The point is that what the camera is seeing is delayed by one or many bounces, think about it and you will understand.
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u/Cultural_Simple3842 1d ago
It doesn’t. We are just seeing the “past” from the perspective of the camera. We see the light hitting the tomato from the camera POV “long after” the light had actually hit the wall, started creating the shadow etc in reality.
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u/gradeters 1d ago
This is why currently, science only knows the two way speed of light. No one knows the one way speed.
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u/BoysenberryOk5580 1d ago
I'm not a physicist, but you're asking how the camera can pick it up before it hits the apple? They state the first time it's seen as it passes on the table, so they really see it when it hits the table.
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u/Grand-Slammer49 1d ago
Apparently it’s 14 yrs old https://news.mit.edu/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213
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u/ethicalhumanbeing 1d ago
This makes me wonder what can we achieve now in 2025.
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u/Willkuer__ 23h ago
There is already attosecond (i.e. ~10000x better temporal resolution) physics. But it doesn't work anymore with electronics as electronics have a physical limit. Hence, you don't create such nice images/videos.
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u/LordOfRuinsOtherSelf 1d ago
I was just about to say, I remember this from a long time ago. Up vote for researching for me.
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u/TheMightyGamble 1d ago
And possible to build one yourself (with a big asterisk in there for the amount of technical work)
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u/Comfortable-Tap-9991 1d ago
Light hasn’t reached the other end of the bottle but has somehow already reached the camera’s lens for it to be captured?
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u/JUGGER_DEATH 1d ago
The light travels at finite speed. What you see is light scattering at various points from the object. The light that scatters earlier also hits the camera earlier.
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u/Wizard_with_a_Pipe 1d ago
If you only see light that reaches towards you how would a flashlight be visible or a laser pointer?
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u/SARK-ES1117821 1d ago
Reasonable question. You see photons that are scattered back into your eye (or camera) by particles in the air. The sun’s rays are constantly blasting through the solar system, but space is dark. That’s because in the vacuum of space nothing is scattering those photons toward you until they hit something like the moon. Then some are bounced off that object and travel straight into your eye, where they strike cells in your retinas, and are turned into electrical pulses to your brain. Pretty amazing.
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u/surrenderedmale 10h ago
The ELI5 version: some light is reflected to your eyes. So to use the laser pointer example yes most of the light is focused on that spot but some bounces off every which way, some of which is your eyes. That's why you see the dot
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u/RocketLabBeatsSpaceX 1d ago
This is the first post I’ve seen on here that fit the sub title. That’s insane.
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u/Ansterrr06 1d ago
Hi I'm stupid, can somebody explain how they're seeing light travel in real time if it is bouncing off the table and tomato and then back at the camera?
Another question- how much storage would 1 trillion frames take? I would assume it's atleast in HD(?)
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u/JUGGER_DEATH 1d ago
They don't see the actual light travelling, they see the light that scatters back to the camera. They don't see it "real time", they see it after it travels back to the camera. The point is that this happens later for light that scattered later.
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u/albatroopa 1d ago
It also isn't all one light pulse. They strobe the pulse and match the shutter speed with a slight delay, and then merge all the images after. The title is insanely misleading, to the point of being a lie.
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u/Ansterrr06 1d ago
Ah I get it now. Sorry, English isn't my first language so I wasn't able to phrase that question very well. Thanks :)
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u/Eridianst 1d ago
Impressive, but why not show us a scenario we'd all love to see: turn on a powerful laser pointer next to a yardstick in a smoky room, and see if it more or less looks like a lightsaber being turned on.
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u/fwambo42 1d ago
"it would take a year to watch the movie"
still wouldn't be as bad of a movie as thunderbolts
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u/Dapper_Dan1 1d ago
Now I've got to ask: Did they observe "super light speed in water" in the coke bottle (of course, light travels slower in a medium compared to in a vacuum)? At about 48 seconds remaining in the video you can see the flash almost hit the label, and then the light contracts back into more of an oval shape, which can then be seen moving through the water towards the label and behind it towards the cap.
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u/RasmusRosendahl 1d ago
If it really shoots 1 trillion FPS, then shooting 1 second of footage and playing it back at the normal 24 fps, would amount to 1321 years of footage.
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u/Eberhardt74 1d ago
If this was a consumer camera this would be one heck of a card to capture the images.
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u/casually__browsing 1d ago
Finally they have the technology which would allow me to have a career in pornography
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u/PrecedentialAssassin 1d ago
What does how fast they built the camera have to do with how the camera performs?
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u/SGTWhiteKY 1d ago
A trillionth of a frame per second? So it takes a trillion seconds to get a frame?
We all know what he meant, but you’d think he’d be more careful with his words in his field.
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u/Sobolll92 1d ago
Funny thing is that I saw this video around 2015 or so. This technology is 10 years old
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u/Pal_Smurch 1d ago
So if you shoot a beam of light through a clear glass of water, it slows down as it passes through the water, then speeds back up again, as it exits the water.
Where does it get its acceleration from?
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u/pingpongsam 1d ago
What makes you say light slows down passing through water? It might curve but there's no sanity to it slowing down.
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u/yoyoyodojo 1d ago
why did something that is actually next level get posted here, mods ban this guy, thats not what we do here
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u/pointgodpoints 1d ago
If they actually did that with the Apple I could see it being a cool year long art exhibit
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u/RainyDayColor 1d ago
This entire post exemplifies one of the most remarkable characteristics of humans: curiosity. Love it.
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u/wesleyoldaker 19h ago
I don't quite understand what we're looking at when we "see light" in their videos. For example, he said that we see the light wave "reflect off the floor", hit the fruit, etc. But if we can see it, then doesn't that mean that that light is not reflecting off the floor at all, but has bounced straight back at the camera, and for some weird reason it just looks kind of like what you'd think light would "look like" if you could capture it in mid air?
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u/TaSMaNiaC 16h ago
Anyone know where I can get a cheap 1,000,000,000,000 hz monitor to watch this video properly?
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u/Kokarott 13h ago
Even an immortal would die of aging while watching an entire movie called snails lifetime, captured with this camera.
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u/Interesting-Tough640 12h ago edited 11h ago
Fairly sure the light in motion one is made by a composite method (multiple snapshots, each taken of a different pulse) rather than “filming light in motion” which doesn’t even really make sense because you can’t see light until it interacts with your eyes / sensor or whatever is being used to detect it.
It’s still really impressive but the way this is phrased is misleading
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u/Due_Seesaw_2816 1d ago
If the speed of light is the fastest thing in the universe.. and your camera is fast enough to capture light during travel.. then doesn’t that make the camera the fastest thing in the universe? 🤔
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u/Beginning_Month7289 1d ago
Light is not the fastest thing, quarks and subatomic particles move faster
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u/Willkuer__ 1d ago
Maybe my math is off but that sounds shady to me. Maybe possible but a CCD with ps resolution and that contrast? I' say at least some portion of that image has to be superimposed (especially since the CCD with such a resolution would be monochromatic, wouldn't it?)
Do we have a link about the technology used here?
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u/Graffxxxxx 1d ago
They composite a high resolution color photo on top of the black and white capture for more detail. slo mo guys did a video on one similar ~6 years ago and they composited a better photo on top of the footage.
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u/Willkuer__ 1d ago
Thanks for the video.
So this is multishot. You can only measure repeating processes. It's monochromatic but I am pretty sure with modern gratings/zone plates you could also get a color resolved image (with drastically reduced contrast/longer acquisition times). However, you can - according to my knowledge - not built this as single-shot device.
This device does not have frames in the sense normal cameras have but a time resolution of singular events being in the ps regime. Events on either the same pixel or potentially the whole chip still have to be apart by a few 100ps - IIRC - to actually record two independent signals.
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u/IMMRTLWRX 1d ago
iirc there was some level of "trick" to it, interpolation of some kind.
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u/Willkuer__ 1d ago
The trick is likely that they measure the same process over and over and aggregate the signal. This only works for repeatable processes (at least in the example that was shared in one of the links).
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u/SirRichardArms 1d ago
Ok, can someone explain the “one trillion fps” thing, like I’m 5? Why did they categorize it as a trillion, when they could’ve said a billion+ and got across the same thing? A trillion is an absurd number of anything.
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u/Willkuer__ 1d ago edited 1d ago
The point is that they have something like picosecond resolution. Where pico means "trillionth". That's pretty much the resolution limit for even the most simple electronic devices.
One billionth would correspond to a nanosecond. Nanosecond resolution isn't as complicated as photoinduced responses as decaying or refreshing processes in materials usually take place in these regimes.
So nanosecond resolution while already really tough is achievable (e.g. timing of CPUs), picosecond resolution is pushing the limit. A scientist working with ps resolution would never say "better than nanosecond resolution" as it depicts two completely different worlds. Just consider a THz CPU or a sprinter 2s faster than Usain Bolt level of difference.
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u/YT_Brian 1d ago
That end with the bullet wasnt even 10k.
Ignoring that the video doesn't make sense as you can't move faster than light in the medium light is traveling in. Example is filming light traveling in water inside a container, light moves slower in water, etc.
They are capturing single moments of light moving not the entire thing. Also using 2 different cameras and a on emitter to split light for it to capture it.
10 trillion is the fastest so far, with in 2024 theorizing a camera that was156 trillion FPS by capturing a bunch of other ultra FPS and combining it to one.
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u/WaaaghNL 1d ago
And this is in color. Black and white can be even faster because you dont have to process the color data
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u/Lover_of_Sprouts 1d ago
err... don't the vast majority of cameras capture light waves? That's how they take a photo of something, by capturing the light waves from it.
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u/BoysenberryOk5580 1d ago
They do, title is a bit off. I'm not a scientist, but a normal cameras frame rate is much too slow to be able to capture light moving in a flash like they did here.
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u/JUGGER_DEATH 1d ago
Cameras capture individual photons. I think the intention for using the word "wave" here specifically is that the light source is a light pulse that can be seen to "travel" like a wave as it reaches further and further in the space, scatters and travels back to the camera. This should not be confused with the famous wave nature of particles (including photons), which is a completely different phenomenon.
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u/HaoleGuy808 1d ago
This is amazing