Here’s What The Speed Of Light Looks Like

I like to keep this blog pretty focused on music and audio, but sometimes there’s something outside that category that’s so cool that I have to share it. In this case, it’s an ultra-slow-motion video of the actual speed of light.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, which, as far as we currently know, is the speed limit of the universe. It’s so incredibly fast that it seems impossible to catch on camera, yet here it is below.

Some optical researchers at the California Institute of Technology recently built the world’s fastest camera that films at an astounding 100 billion frames per second! The latest superhero movie that you watched was filmed at just 24 (not billion, just 24) as a comparison. Believe it or not, that’s not as fast as the camera will shoot. It’s capable of up to 10 trillion frames per second. Now that’s slow motion.

The video comes from The Slow Mo Guys YouTube channel and shows a photon from a laser shoot through a bottle of water. It’s a long video, but the fun begins at around 4 minutes in.

The video also covers how the camera works, and an interesting video of a single pulse of light bouncing between mirrors, through the air, and across some figurines.

Just to keep this on the subject of audio, transducer technology (meaning microphones and loudspeakers) hasn’t changed in more than a hundred years. There’s already been plenty of experimentation with lasers used in that capacity, but I believe it’s experiments like the one above that will lead to breakthroughs that will provide a new generation of transducers. That’s all well and good, but will they sound vintage (you know that someone will ask that)?

[I actually posted this about 5 years ago, but came across it in a search and thought is was something worth posting again. I hope you agree.]

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