Has someone built a camera capable of capturing video at such an extreme speed that it allows us to observe the movement of light itself.
This is a prototype that reaches 2,000 million frames per secondenough not only to see how a blue laser beam progresses, but also to record events that have already occurred when the light reaches the sensor.
This has been demonstrated Brian Haidetdoctor in Materials Sciences, who shows how his camera works on his YouTube channel.
In one of the demonstrations, its laser is projected towards a mirror, bounces and continues its trajectory towards another, creating a kind of staircase of light.
Thanks to this capture speed, the propagation of the beam can be seen frame by frame, something impossible to observe with conventional cameras.
It could be said that it is a camera capable of “seeing the past”, although in reality they all do: the light always takes a while, even if it is negligible, to reach the objective. The thing is that conventional cameras do not have the capacity to record the propagation of light itself.
To understand the magnitude of the experiment, Just remember that a single second recorded at 60 fps is equivalent to more than 33 million frames if captured at 2 billion per second..
During the tests, something curious arose: when the researcher brought the camera closer to the point where the laser originates, the light that moves away seems to advance more slowly than the light that returns towards the objective.
Explain that the blue color of the beam always advances at the same speed, since the speed of light is a universal physical limit. That is, physical processes can slow down light, but not accelerate it beyond that limit.
The apparent difference in speed is due solely to perspective. As the beam moves away, each frame takes longer to receive light from the previous point, so the sequence appears to stretch.
And on the contrary: when the beam moves towards the camera, the time it takes for the light to reach each frame is compressed and gives the impression that it is traveling faster.
So light, at no time, actually changes speed: It is the camera’s point of view that modifies temporal perception.