The realm of optics is advancing so rapidly now that at MIT scientists were able to create a super camera that has one trillion frames per second Now you may say to yourself so what Well think of a light beam A light beam in a billionth of a second travels about a foot Now when you look at yourself in a mirror in the morning you say to yourself well that's me actually that's not you at all You're looking at an image that is you a billionth of a second ago cause that's the time it takes for light to go from your face to the mirror back to your eyes Same thing for the moon when you look at the moon you're not really looking at the moon as it is at all You're looking at the moon as it was about a second ago well here's a new camera that can take a trillion frames per second and actually capture these processes that are beyond human comprehension We forget the fact that the human brain and our senses have a time scale associated with it chemical reactions in the brain chemical reactions in the eye in our senses take place at a very definite speed the speed of chemical reactions So we have a normal time frame Our body measures time in fractions of a second to a second to minutes That's the normal frame of reference of the human body But there's a whole universe out there where events take place on a scale of billionths of a second and another time scale where events take place over a time scale of billions of years And the sad thing is that we humans our human brain is unaccustomed to dealing with these two extreme universes that we never see For example evolution why is it that so many people don't believe in evolution Because they can't see it happening with their own eyes and now we're taking a look at another time scale a scale of billionths of a second when perhaps in the future we may be able to photograph chemical reactions as they take place This could open up a whole new realm of science the science that takes place on a scale of nanoseconds for example take a look at photosynthesis Photosynthesis is a rather mysterious process believe it or not We physicists still have not worked out the complete quantum mechanics of photosynthesis which mother nature figured out billions of years ago And part of the problem is these chemical processes take place on a nanoscale that is way outside our ability to photograph and that's why new cameras like this could open up a gateway really open up the floodgates to a new branch of research
