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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_9vd4HWlVA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_9vd4HWlVA)

OMG how crazy is this ?!?!?

crazily enjoyed this video, and the speaker is funny by itself - i love indians - he ist talking about recording light at the speed of light, you know from when this video is ?! the most crazyness is how they apply this technique to look around the corners, awesome technological stuff

What is next... I'm so glad to all these new things happening in my lifetime. I don't think often appreciate the things that advanced... when I was boy something like cellphones was protrayed in SciFi movies and I was in awe... now you laugh at analogue phone sets?? Cool!

That is pretty wild David...and hard to believe as its hard to figure how a shutter can be faster than the speed of light.......
Thanks for sharing

Amazing, some further links:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/246141/mits_light_speed_camera_snaps_a_trillion_frames_per_second.html (http://www.pcworld.com/article/246141/mits_light_speed_camera_snaps_a_trillion_frames_per_second.html)
http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Eraskar/trillionfps/ (http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Eraskar/trillionfps/)

I am not sure, for what i have read the timeline is projected somehow in the space of the sensors, because shutter speeds of a picosecond does not exists?
In scopes ccd's can archive some giga samples per second with tricks, but that would be more around hundred picoseconds.
If someone has more infos about the specific sensors and projections, please tell!

And another very interesting topic i found today on APOD:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120821.html (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120821.html)

DNA replication rendered...

there is no such shutter, i guess not in this universe.
i can't say, that i understood even approximately, but i saw a record a while ago, speaking of hundreds (or thousands?) of identical shootings in a row, only with some time shifting between light pulse and camera recording. the trick is to synchronize theese time-shifts with the given precision, to computate the illusion of  continuity afterwards. this is not made of a single take (how could it?)

yes, such shutter cant exists, they combine many shootings, especially because of the amount of light that can be grabbed, he is talking about how they did it in the speech, but hence it is recording at the speed of light, you as human do not realize a delay, especially when making photos of around the corners ...  it is awesome hightech ... as a side note, i think the facebook community is rather dumb, i posted it in the "i fluffing love science group" and received just 3 likes ... from a group which consists of +700.000 members ... i am glad this received some response here ;)

Yes, but this will not explain everything because you might start the recording of many sensors in a synchronized manner, but you cannot stop each photon collecting in a picosecond, so you would record photons from starting time until nearly end of experiment.  This would hardly to be deconvoluted in afterwards processing to form good images.
And i read in the follow-up links something about projecting the timeline onto the ccd-line somehow, what would make more sense to me.

Of course, in reality the produncing of such animations is a very complex thing with here 500 sensors that can only record a 1d line and with a rotating mirror the 2d view is archieved by the "slowest" "fasted" camera.  :dink:

"there is no such shutter, i guess not in this universe.
i can't say, that i understood even approximately, but i saw a record a while ago, speaking of hundreds (or thousands?) of identical shootings in a row, only with some time shifting between light pulse and camera recording"

This can make some sense, but the triggereing then would have to be the the speed of light....maybe possible with many cameras...but he shows a single camera and lens in the video if I am remembering right....
It may be a very, very fast camera, which then uses simple morph software to interpilate frames to make the video as it stands
At face value its a little mind boggling

as you know, i am more a philosopher, than a scientist, so i don't know the answer, but i can imagine, that it is possible to generate a light pulse of one picosecond (ok, i can't even imagine a picosecond - i can only count digits). we have light emitters, that can produce single photons and between two ticks of a 3ghz processor light travels around 10cm, so why not such a short light pulse?  :hmh:

edit> weak argument, i see myself...

It is becoming very technical i fear, but that is what is triggering me  :)
Have build some cameras with ccd sensors by myself, so my little clue is related upon this..
the main problem here is not the light pulse, what is of course possible to generate such a short light impulse. The problem is to record only photons in such a little time interval as one picosecond and discard all photons that arrives later or earlier.

You must have a device that you can trigger also whith a picosecond short pulse that is only collecting photons in this short time.
This might sound more easy than it is actually (but i am not sure if such a device exists, that is what i would like to know), usually camera sensors got far longer times to clean registers and move charges into a light shielded register - you would also collect the amount of photons arriving earlier or later on a scale of nanoseconds up to microseconds, and no time seperation would be archieved.
The fastest timerecording elements commonly used are in oscilloscopes... ok, seems that 25 picoseconds are possible nowadays, maybe thay used ultrafast diodes with such a recording technology.

As far as I understand, they shoot their photos in a dark lab. The only photons that are around at any given instant of time are those of a single pulse. The sensors do not just record the amount of light, but also the time at which it arrives (i.e. it is a movie camera rather than a still image camera).

A new light pulse is not sent into the scene until the current one has completely faded. With near-perfect synchronization between light source and camera, they can record an image pixel by pixel, because their scenes are always completely static.

The shutter in this case is the laser that illuminates the subject a number of times. I think you can compare it with taking a picture with a very slow film (i.e. very low ISO/DIN/ASA value) of a droplet falling from a faucet with the aid of a stroboscope; the camera is open, while the flashes from the stroboscope "freeze" the motion. If you know the frequency of the droplets falling and you increase the stroboscope frequency to a multiple of the droplet frequency, you can make a movie by combining every nth frame that you record, and you will have a movie of a droplet falling very slowly. One might wonder though, if Heisenberg will start to play a role if these pulses are becoming so short, that the number of photons is almost countable... Anybody any ideas on that?

But it sure generates pretty pictures!

i realized just after writing, but didn't want to delete. it is just like photographing a gun bullet with normal exposure time.

maybe the solution of avoiding "light smear" is, that they only shoot one image-line per light pulse (the thing with the slow rotating mirror)
anyhow, in the end - i'm not that thrilled by detailed technical solutions. i'm rather the one, thinking about new cases of use  :dink:

Yes, it sound more like shooting with an open shutter. In fact creating the images for the movie takes more than an hour: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html

They use a streak camera which records 1 spatial dimension, but also time information. It is explained here: http://sales.hamamatsu.com/assets/pdf/catsandguides/e_streakh.pdf.


Not sure it matters? In a double-slit experiment, even if you only emit a single photon at a time, the resulting patterns accumulated over time will be equal to sending lots of photons over a smaller period.

Wow that says 0.06mm resolution (or how far light smears in a "frame") now I'm thinking they could have had a cleaner image :)

Ah, many thanks, this was the missing link!  This camera is projecting the signal with positional change over time onto the output, just like an oscilloscope, but optimized for light input signals.


The shorter the pulse, the wider the frequency range of it (outgoing from a laser pulse that is usually more or less a single frequency).  Don't want to calculate yet how short it could be until you would loose color information, or maybe you want to make the frquency response wider to cover the visible spectrum and be able to get a color image with filtering in r,g,b.  Dunno.  ^-^

what i wanted to like to ask if i where in the audience was:

wouldnt shooting exactly the same beam at exact the same location produce same results ? what strategy do you use to span a whole (limited) 3d space from diffuse reflections on a surface?  do you analyse surfaces by fractal dimension ? and optimize "shattering" of beams ? :D :D :D

The space cockroach, coool :)

Yea - as I said on FB, if there's ever an armageddon, short of the complete destruction of earth then these things will almost certainly survive to repopulate and keep life going afterwards.

perhaps they already created the life on this planet ? and will just travel further through space with some mushroom spores alongside...

Actually I think that could be coz I think that's where it was posted in the first place ;)

Wow, this is really driving me insane...! Unbelievable!
Thanks for posting David!

 :o Whoa! That's crazy cool