What Happens If You Keep Slowing Down?

This is a video of light traveling through a bottle at 250 billion frames per second. And here's that same video, but now with the camera moving. You can see it sweeps across the scene faster than the laser pulse itself. Which means this camera must be traveling faster than light.

So, how is this possible? Well, in this video, I want to show you three unusual ways of stopping time and what you can see if you just keep slowing down. From a century old technique that still beats modern slow-mo cameras all the way to a massive quadrillion frames per second camera that captures electrons whizzing around molecules. By the 1920s, electric motors were the new standard for powering factories and mills.

But many of these motors also came with a flaw. They were sensitive to fluctuations in the electrical grid. A power surge, like from a lightning strike, made them behave unpredictably. So, one MIT engineer named Harold Doc Edertton set out to find a solution.

He had a setup that could induce these power surges in a lab. But no matter what he tried, Edertton just couldn't see what was going on with the motors because the machines would spin too fast for the human eye to see. And cameras at the time offered no help. Their exposure times were too slow.

So any photograph of a running motor would come out blurry. But one day, Edertton noticed that every time he triggered a power surge, his equipment gave off a bright flash of light. And when [music] that flash hit the motor, the moving parts appeared to stand perfectly still, as if frozen in time, which gave him an idea. He could turn off all the lights in the room, set up a camera, and leave the shutter open.

And since there was no light, no image would form on the film. But then if he could illuminate the motor with a very brief and very bright flash like the ones his equipment gave off, well then he would get a sharp photograph. All Editton needed was a way to reliably create these flashes. So he started by using a high voltage power source to load electrons onto a capacitor [music] where they piled up onto one of the plates.

But because there was an insulator slotted between the two sides, the electrons couldn't just ...