Thread: Slow motion camera that beats light's speed

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...oving-air.html

The first stunning images of moving bullets appeared around 50 years ago – now a team of snap happy scientists have trumped that achievement by photographing streaks of light.
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) needed some very specialised equipment to pull off the feat, as light travels around a million times faster than a bullet.
The team used a camera that collected the light beams at a rate of roughly one trillion frames per second - that's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-litre bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.
‘We have built a virtual slow motion camera where were can see photons, or light particles, moving through space,’ explained Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor of the MIT Media Lab.

Ok, well I don't know why he's saying he can see "photons moving through space." He cannot track single photons. But, what he can do is image a light pulse, of course going at the speed of light, as it travels through space.

Imagine seeing a strobe light or camera flash flash once, and being able to see that flash travel from the source outwards. That's what he's able to do. It's pretty amazing.

Of course it still takes the speed of light for light scattered off objects to reach the camera. But otherwise I'm not sure how they do it or quite why it doesn't violate relativity, which I can assure you it does not.


EDIT: I'm stupid. Of course I know why it doesn't violate relativity.