Came across these via Facebook posts and....amazing !

[Syntopia]

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.

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?

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.

[eiffie]

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

[Jesse]

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.

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.

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?

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.  

[cKleinhuis]

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 ?

[bib]

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

The space cockroach, coool

[David Makin]

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.

[cKleinhuis]

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...

[David Makin]

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

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

[KRAFTWERK]

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

[darciamoonz]

  Whoa! That's crazy cool