Recording the speed of light may seem like science fiction, or at least it did until Brian Haidet proved otherwise. Thanks to his YouTube channel, where he goes by the name AlphaPhoenix, made a special camera to record a laser beam at two billion frames per second (FPS).
Haidet, who has a doctorate in materials science, had already built a billion-FPS camera in 2024, so he spent the last 12 months improving his creation. SO, Using a mirror, a lens, two tubes, a cable, he begins to design the device. But his job wasn’t easy because he had to procure “one of the strangest camera flash bulbs ever built.”
“Not only is it fast enough to see the movement of light, butIt’s also good for seeing the past“, underlined the youtuber in your video. His intention was to capture the path of light bouncing around his garage, so he needed to have not only the best materials but also hundreds of lines of Python to then be able to interpret the images.
“Light is moving about 15 centimeters per frame of this video. The light beam is traveling at the maximum speed of the universe. Light in any reference frame will never move faster or slower than this speed,” he explained. For the camera to work at such speed, could only record one pixel at a time and what it finally did was create a mosaic with all the data.
This type of technique, as striking as it may seem, is the one used by astrographers to obtain photographs of celestial objects with the highest possible resolution. “If all these videos are synchronized and we take many, many single-pixel videos, we can mosaic these videos side by side and play them all at exactly the same time and get something that looks like a video,” he said before showing off his big achievement.
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