Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it visualizes the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look “around” corners or see inside the body without X-rays.

Photography is about creating images by recording light. At the MIT media lab, professor Ramesh Raskar and his team members have invented a camera that can photograph light itself as it moves at, well, the speed of light.

“All the people in these Ted Talks kind of act the same. I wonder if they are given acting lessons on how to gesture and move before they go on.”

Yeah, I noticed that as well

And most cases it’s used car salesmanship nonsense.

It's very impressive, but he is giving a bit of a sales pitch. He sort of 'fessed up when he mentioned that they had to build up each frame statistically because the ultrashort exposure times entailed ultralow intensities. So you have to build up each frame, then shift your time window, and build up another frame. He didn't say how long all this took, but it sounds very laborious. Again, not denying that the perspective it provides on the femtosecond time scale is very interesting and impressive, and no doubt leads to greater understanding. I don't see how they are going to be able to make any kind of gizmos out of this, however.

One other thing. The talk of photographing light is to me very unphilosophic, even if it's hard not to think of it that way. Photons are not objects and do not follow trajectories! They are as Quantum Ghosty as any of the Ghosty phenomena that you here talked about with regard to Quantum Computing and so on.

I remember in PSSC physics in high school when they showed us milk cartons coming off a conveyor belt, in contradistinction to milk pouring from a spout. I had an epiphany of sorts years later when I read the development of photon quantum theory in an early chapter of Sakurai's ADVANCED QUANTUM MECHANICS ... Photons as quantum-mechanical excitations of the radiation field ...

At last we have a camera that can record the rate at which comrade obama spends money down to dollars and cents. We always suspected that was occurring at relativistic velocities because the money was continuously being spent faster than it was being earned.

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