MIT builds a camera fast enough to capture the motion of Light

In keeping with this webpage being random as hell, now a science post!

From MIT's website:
MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom. Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, one of the system’s developers, calls it the “ultimate” in slow motion: “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,” he says.

Particles of light — photons — enter the camera through the slit and are converted into electrons, which pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects the electrons corresponding to late-arriving photons more than it does those corresponding to early arriving ones. 


The image produced by the camera is two-dimensional, but only one of the dimensions — the one corresponding to the direction of the slit — is spatial. The other dimension, corresponding to the degree of deflection, is time. The image thus represents the time of arrival of photons passing through a one-dimensional slice of space.

"B*tches LOVE high speed cameras!"

Source -> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html via http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/13/dnp-mit-builds-camera-that-can-capture-at-the-speed-of-light-vi/ via https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lingers-in-face-of-mit-media-lab-camera.html?_r=2&ref=technology

Another physics post -> http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2011/07/god-particle-close-to-being-discovered.html