They have captured the speed of light for the first time

Discover how this technological milestone was possible

The speed of light is one of the most brilliant predictions in physics and was narrowed down thanks to calculations made by James Clerk Maxwell in the Philosophical Transactions in 1865. However, have you ever wondered if it is possible? photograph this universal constant? It seems that answer is affirmative and we explain it to you below.

These YouTubers claim to have filmed the speed of light

At the time, in case you are curious, we will tell you the relationship between the pyramids of Egypt and the speed of light. But leaving that myth behind, we have to talk to you about a YouTube channel that we highly recommend and that has been able to portray the universal constant in slow motion.

We are talking about the famous The Slo Mo Guys, a couple of content creators who are dedicated to making spectacular slow motion recordings and that, for the first time, they have managed to capture the speed of light, as you can see in the video that we show you below these lines.

These youtubers approached, in the year 2019until the California Institute of Technology and they entered into the Compressed Ultrafast Photography department. Peng Wang, one of the students who regularly use the institution’s facilities, has allowed them to see first-hand the operation of a camera very special, that is capable of recording at 10 billion frames per second.

The recording made by Gav and Dan allows us to observe, starting at minute 4:30, how the light travels through the inside of a plastic bottle conventional for 2,000 picoseconds. So that you can understand it better, this camera has been able to record the light passing through the liquid contained in the bottle, which only takes 0.0000000002 seconds in going through it.

Later, starting at minute 8:30, we can see how a couple of figures that represent these content creators are recorded at 500 billion frames per second, being able, again, to capture the visual representation of the speed of light. In the bottle example, so that the light could be made more visible, milk molecules were incorporated to clarify the visual experiment.

Lastly, the recording of light passing through a vial that contains milk leaves us with one of the best moments of the video, where we can see the most ghostly version of the universal constant 10 billion frames per second. The most amazing thing is knowing that in the time scale of the last recording, a bullet would have taken years to travel through the vial. Physics put into practice and leaving us speechless.

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