from Hacker News

Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion FPS

by Vinz_ on 7/6/14, 6:39 PM with 16 comments

• by ColinWright on 7/6/14, 7:39 PM

  Lengthy discussion:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3346609

  Other submissions:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347267

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347793

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348210

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348427

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348679

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3349278

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3349614

• by stcredzero on 7/6/14, 8:43 PM

  One of the things that are unrealistic about "bullet time" as portrayed in games and movies, is that the world doesn't dim as time slows down. Slow the rest of the universe down, and the amount of light energy entering your pupil per unit time slows down as well.

  One of the things that came up in the criticisms of Khan Academy's teaching of slope/rate is that lots of people don't internalize a conception of sensory intensities as rates. To some people out there, things like speed are feelings of intensity divorced from the notion of X things happening in a second.

  This is probably especially true for things like brightness.

• by tritium on 7/7/14, 1:37 AM

  This photography isn't really about "photons" or any amount of energy measurements of radiation emission at the subatomic scale. This is more about capturing macro-scale events at very precise time scales and exceedingly high shutter speeds, and detecting how quickly an arbitrary amount of light will traverse the components of a still life.

  There's also a lot of distortion introduced into the final composited images, enough that they cease to look like photographs of normal physical objects, and start to look more like computer generated images of ray traced 3D models.

• by e3pi on 7/7/14, 5:21 AM

  The camera filming itself in perpendicular mirror? Would we see an appreciable delay for each diminishing image, or what?

• by vilhelm_s on 7/6/14, 10:37 PM

  Does this have any practical applications, or is it just a (very cool!) art project?