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Believe it or not, scientists have developed a superfast camera, the size of a dustbin, which can capture the speed of light.
A
team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims its superfast
camera can show a bullet-shaped pulse of light travelling from one end
of a laboratory flask to another in a fraction of a second, the British
media said.
The scientists, however, say that it will be some time before the camera is commercially available.
Prof Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab told The Sunday Times: "With our ultra-fast imaging we can actually analyse how the photons are travelling through the world."
The camera can also create 3D images because it is capable of 'seeing' photons of light even inside objects, say the scientists.
The device was made by adapting a 'streaker
tube' -- used by chemists to scan and capture light. It can record the
progress of light pulses through a flask of liquid.
Each still picture had a shutter speed of 1.7 picoseconds -- a trillionth of a second.
Raskar
added: "Watching this it looks like light in slow motion. It is so slow
you can see the light itself move across the distance.
"This
is the speed of light captured: there is nothing in the universe that
moves faster, so we are at the physical limit of high-speed
photography."
