Light Speed Q&A: Can Cameras Capture Light?

  • Context: High School 
  • Thread starter Thread starter Mohd Abdullah
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Light Light speed Speed
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
Sign up Log in
1 reply · 2K views
Mohd Abdullah
Messages
99
Reaction score
3
Hi,

Are anyone here familiar with this?

It shows a camera that can capture 1 trillion frames per second, and the camera can be used to record the speed of light. The other day, I saw an article when I was searching something on Google and it said a 4 trillion camera were created by Japanese scientists and it also can be used to record light.

But I doubt that those cameras can actually record something that is moving at light speed, let alone recording the light itself. In my opinion, what they were recorded were actually not light itself and I think they were recording something that was actually moving much slower than light. Thoughts?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
They did record the light, but they didn't capture it all in one go.

As I understand it, they can capture a single string of pixels' intensities with a "shutter speed" that's phenomenally fast, because of electronic switching of the photodetectors instead of actual shutters.
What they do is shoot the pulse of light again and again, to get the intensity distribution of every pixel over the total number of frames needed for the movie. It would be a painstaking and laborious process if computers weren't so good at what they do.