Huh?
The reason you can't watch grass grow is because it happens very slowly. 4 trillion frames per second would just make it appear to be slower, right? You could watch grass grow if the camera went -slower- not -faster- if I'm not mistaken. Huh?
Japanese boffins have invented a way to shoot video at 4.4 trillion frames per second. You read that right. 4.4 trillion. As in a million times a million, or 1012. The camera uses a technique called “Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography” that, as explained in Nature Photonics, uses “all-optical mapping of the …
Huge apologies to Uncle Ron, I just saw an earlier version of this article with the original El-Reg sub-headline intact.
Clearly not worked out the difference between Humming birds and growing grass. Or drying paint.
I'd copy/paste it but it's an image. It's on their Facebook feed if you want to check it out!
"They must be taking extremely short movies."
Well, very long movies of things that happen extremely fast.
Playing back 4.4 trillion frames per second at theatre standard 32 frames per second would take... <fiddles with calculator> a damned long time!
But that takes time you don't have. Last I checked, we don't have image processing ICs capable of running in the Terahertz range yet, and this may well requires something operating in petahertz to be able to process images in realtime in trillionths of a second. Anything less than realtime and you have to deal with storage and transfer bandwidth between the camera and storage AND the storage and the processor.
"You read that right. 4.4 trillion. As in a million times a million, or 10^12"
In British English, a million times a million is a billion. A trillion is a million times that.
ie: 1000x1000 = 1 million. x1000 => milliard. x1000 => billion. x1000 => billiard. etc.
/troll-out
When I were a lass (umpty-'leven years ago)* a billion were a million million, and that was that. Then I noticed over the years that the financial news , often talking in dollars, started using the word billion as meaning a thousand million, apparently because that's what the Americans used and it was their currency being spoken of. being interested in astronomy, the million million form of billion naturally had more appeal - easier to talk of bigger numbers with that schema (a trillion being a million million million; add another million for a quadrillion, etc). I ended up thinking of ten to the ninth as a 'financial billion' and ten to the twelfth as a 'proper billion' - and still do. So I'm afraid I'd disagree with Mr Webb above, unless the subject is finance, which it isn't. Doubtless I'm out of step with current usage... sigh.
*OK, about 50
Ivan 4, you should be more discerning about whom you listen to. Here’s the OED exegesis under billion:
The name appears not to have been adopted in Eng. [from 16th c. French] before the end of the 17th c.: see [1690] quot. from Locke. Subsequently the application of the word was changed by French arithmeticians [to the short scale]. In the 19th century [by 1834], the U.S. adopted the French convention, but Britain retained the original and etymological use (to which France reverted in 1948).
Since 1951 the U.S. value, a thousand millions, has been increasingly used in Britain, especially in technical writing and, more recently, in journalism; but the older sense ‘a million millions’ is still common.
If you haven't already seen it, you might like this video - it's not quite a one take trillion fps, but it is a visualisation of a pulse of laser light passing through a coke bottle done using multiple passes, and it still makes me go wow....
Thank you, I will check it later, and you didn't make fun of my typo (pace... instead of place), so I will give you one deserved upvote.
By the way, I'd like to see that Mosquito laser ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser ) working on the same terms.
Excel calulated, errors and pentium bugs expected :p
Camera runs at 4.4 trillion FPS - 4.4*10^12
Speed of light 300 million m/s:
Average screen resolution: 92 dpi
39 inches/metre, so 3588 dots per metre.
So, one light second, = 1*10^12 pixels
It would therefore seem that this camera runs fast enough to capture light moving across the screens slow enough that 4.4 frames of full speed video would only see the light beam move by 1 pixel across an average screen... Impressive.
Actually, there's a bit of a trick to high speed shutters: they don't open and close! No, it's rotary. The Fastax high speed rotating-prism went to 10,000 framers per second, and the Rapatronic camera with its polarizing filters allows speeds down to 10 nanoseconds. But of course, that's back in the 1940's.
That said, it's actually using a laser to strobe the subject: "An ultrashort laser pulse is split by the temporal mapping device (TMD) into a series of discrete daughter pulses in different spectral bands, which are incident on the target as successive ‘flashes’ for stroboscopic image acquisition."
There you go, no shutter, just a laser to strobe the target.
At that speed,if you were able to resolve them you would see proteins folding (fastest ones fold 10-12), but they are really small and beyond optical light for individual molecues.
But watch cell replication, you might be able to see some protein complexes action (not the proteins themselves but the sequence of movements).
P.