1 000 000 000 000 Frames A Second
This is incredible. Watching the duality of light in super duper slow motion! Awesome! Science rules!
In 1964 MIT professor Harold Edgerton, pioneer of stop-action photography, famously took a photo of a bullet piercing an apple using exposures as short as a few nanoseconds. Inspired by his work, Ramesh Raskar and his team set out to create a camera that could capture not just a bullet (traveling at 850 meters per second) but light itself (nearly 300 million meters per second).
Stop a moment to take that in: photographing light as it moves. For that, they built a camera and software that can visualize pictures as if they are recorded at 1 trillion frames per second. The same photon-imaging technology can also be used to create a camera that can peer “around” corners , by exploiting specific properties of the photons when they bounce off surfaces and objects.
Among the other projects that Raskar is leading, with the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture research group, are low-cost eye care devices, a next generation CAT-Scan machine and human-computer interaction systems.
Papers:
Andreas Velten, Thomas Willwacher, Otkrist Gupta, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Moungi G. Bawendi and Ramesh Raskar, “Recovering ThreeDimensional Shape around a Corner using Ultra-Fast Time-of-Flight Imaging.” Nature Communications, March 2012
Andreas Velten, Adrian Jarabo, Belen Masia, Di Wu, Christopher Barsi, Everett Lawson, Chinmaya Joshi, Diego Gutierrez, Moungi G. Bawendi and Ramesh Raskar, “Ultra-fast Imaging for Light in Motion” (in progress). http://femtocamera.info
“Though photographs in the near future will still be composed by people holding cameras, it will gradually become more accurate to say pictures were computed rather than ‘taken’ or ‘captured.’”Popular Photography magazine
Benjamin Zander on music and passion
I think this is how music should be taught in junior high and high schools. The minimal theory we get is so irrelevant to anything else, and if a guy like this came to talk to a high school music class, it would easily change the performance, the technique, and the overall intelligence of the musicians. I know I definitely don’t listen to music in the way he describes, I often find it hard to connect with some pieces, especially as they grow larger in number of performers and into the 20th century.
Benjamin Zander does a fantastic job of speaking and getting his points across in a comical and understandable manner.
I loved this video. Props to my brother for showing me.
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- Musical Insights (lithe.wordpress.com)
