Every new Slow Mo Guys video just makes me go “wow!”. Seething every day things shot at tens or hundreds of thousand frames per second and then massively slowed down just reveals such amazing things. It might be something incredibly beautiful, or funny, or just plain fascinating to watch.
One thing they get asked about regularly, though, is to film light itself. A seemingly impossible task, but now they’ve done it, using a camera that shoots at an extremely crazy 10,000,000,000,000 frames per second.
The maximum that the slow mo guys have recorded at before is up to about half a million frames per second. But here sees Gav and Dan head to the California Institute of Technology to see a camera that can shoot at 10 trillion (12 zeroes!) frames per second.
For a comparison of just how slow a half a million frames per second is, a one-second sequence shot at 500,000 frames per second and then played back at 24fps would take almost 6 hours to watch back. That same one-second clip shot at 10 trillion frames per second would take 1,321 years to watch back.
If you fired a bullet through this frame it would take years to go from one side to the other.
– Gav
Light moves so quickly that the video sequences is measured in picoseconds (1/1,000,000,000,000th of a second). And even that number has a decimal point because it’s not just fine enough to measure just how fast this is.
It’s insane to think technology has gotten to the point where we can even consider seeing this stuff, let alone actually being able to do it. The boys have put up a second video now, talking with those behind the technology to see exactly how it works.
While almost none of us will ever have the chance to use cameras like this, it’s incredibly fascinating to watch.
What do you want to see recorded in slow motion that Gav & Dan haven’t covered yet?
FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!