Two guys captured the speed of light on camera at 10 trillion frames per second
"The light is moving a million times faster than a bullet.”
The Slow Mo Guys had to use a special camera.
Gavin Free and Daniel Gruchy aka The Slow Mo Guys, have filmed all sorts of things in, you guessed it, slow motion—everything from popcorn makers to giant water balloons to tattoo guns. Each of their videos feels a bit like an episode of “Mythbusters”—just a couple of guys making science super fun.
One of the Slow Mo Guys’ most popular videos to date features the fastest thing known to man: light.Since light travels at an unfathomable 186,282 miles per second, Free and Gruchy had to reach out to CalTech in Pasadena, California for a camera that could capture “10 trillion frames per second,” which they said was “20 million times faster than the fastest we've ever filmed on this channel."
The team first shoots a beam of light through a bottle of milk water. Even though to the naked eye, it looks as though the bottle instantly lit up, the later footage reveals the light (a sort of blue ghost-like thing in the playback) travels from one side of the bottle to the other.
“Every frame seems to be ten picoseconds,” Free says. “And we're just sort of casually watching this go left to right through the bottle, but in reality the light is moving a million times faster than a bullet.”
Watch the full video below, which includes a few other fascinating slow motion experiments with light.
Though it may sound like science fiction, we live in a time where capturing the fastest thing in the universe on camera is a fun experiment for an afternoon. Neat!
This article originally appeared in February.