At 1 trillion frames per second, this camera CAN make light go in slow motion. Remember, light travels (in a vacuum) at 186,000 miles per second (doing the math is 700 million miles / hour), so the word “fast” doesn’t do justice to this new system from the boffins of MIT. The clip is showing the capture of light propagating over the apple:
The new technique, which we call femto-photography, consists of femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques. Our light source is a Titanium Sapphire laser that emits pulses at regular intervals every ~13 nanoseconds. These pulses illuminate the scene, and also trigger our picosecond accurate streak tube which captures the light returned from the scene. The streak camera has a reasonable field of view in horizontal direction but very narrow (roughly equivalent to one scan line) in vertical dimension.
(H/T: Gizmodo)
