Welcome to a new feature we're trying out over the next few weeks: the Manufacturing.net Video of the Day. With an increasing amount of good content being distributed through video, we feel that it's important to give space to the best ones we've found. And we all know that sometimes, it's good to just take a break and take in some cool sights or interesting ideas.
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have done the impossible it seems: they have filmed light in slow motion. Okay, it's more complex than that. The camera is so quick that the resulting video allows researchers to see photons actually moving through space, which has never been accomplished before.
The camera uses 500 sensors, each delayed 1 trillionth of a second after each other, in order to capture the scene at such an incredible speed. A titanium sapphire laser provides the necessary light. At such immense speeds, the camera is only capable of capturing a single line of video data, but that laser provides remarkably regular pulses of light, which means the scene can be shot again and again, each time capturing a different line. The researchers then stitch all these video fragments together to get the end result, which can be seen in the video below. Check it out.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXgODHMWk width:640 height:390]
