2024-12-20

[public] 671 views, 50.4K likes, dislikes audio only

AlphaPhoenix

Visit https://brilliant.org/alphaphoenix/ to start your free 30-day trial, and get 20% off a premium annual subscription!

So apparently buying a high speed camera wasn't enough, because after two videos with it I decided to build my own, but 5 orders of magnitude faster…

In this video I'm filming the motion of light as it flies across my garage at… well, the speed of light! It's fast. So fast that even with my best setup so far, I get 18 frames of video from one end of the room to the other, and those frames have a lot of temporal blur so realistically each "frame" is actually kind of an average of the information that by right should belong to 5-10 frames. It's a mess, but it works.

I'm using the technique from the electricity waves video where I used repeated oscilloscope measurements synced after the fact to produce "videos" of electricity moving down a wire. The only difference is that instead of measuring electricity waves, I'm measuring light emitted by a laser, bouncing off the wall, traveling to my camera, and landing in the window of a photomultiplier tube. UNLIKE the electricity waves video, this setup (thankfully) is automated, and an optics assembly slews across angle space, building up a 3d dataset of video, collecting all the time information from each pixel sequentially.

It's a really fun project that I've wanted to do for a long time, and just recently got pulled together.

Hope you enjoy!

Relevant AlphaPhoenix videos:

Electricity waves: /youtube/video/2AXv49dDQJw

Electricity waves (experimental details): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sty0Y1qmgEY

Replicating the original speed of light measurement: /youtube/video/YMO9uUsjXaI

Massive thanks to my top Patreon supporters!

birdiesnbritts

John Sosa Trustham

Vladimir Shklovsky

Aloysius Sparglepartz

Jason Whatley

Lohann Paterno Coutinho Ferreira

Jeffrey Mckishen

nothings

Eugene Pakhomov

Glenn Willen

R520

Nick F

Mirko Rener

Chris Connett

Tyler Filla

Miles Freeman

Benjamin Manns

MPG

Seth Reuter

Danny Thomas

Toby T

Lucy Fur

tiaz

David Antoš

Chris Duvarney

Nick Wage

John T

Jack Serrino

Ethan Sifferman

Dit55

Chapters:

0:00 Intro - What's a lightspeed camera?

2:30 Watch light move

3:43 Forming an image from many observations

6:20 Time-of-flight delay

9:52 The light has to turn on fast

14:14 The sensor has to turn on fast

18:23 Photomultiplier tubes

20:11 Building and testing the camera

23:56 Breaking the camera

25:00 Hero shots

27:23 Brilliant.org

Media Credits:

I Dunno by grapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) http://ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626

Arcadia - Wonders by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100326 Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Run by Ethan Meixsell - YouTube Audio Library License

Switched on Carcassi by Brian Bolger - YouTube Audio Library License

Disco Knights by Quincas Moreira - Youtube Audio Library License

Visualizing video at the speed of light — one trillion frames per second

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXgODHMWk

The Waymo Driver navigating freeways

Waymo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX7yzyfQ6E

VFX Artists DEBUNK FLYING ORB UFO Videos

Corridor Crew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39SJAcNXCzM

"In a cave with a box of scraps" meme from Iron Man