Two billion frames per second: see light in motion. A home-built hyper camera turns physics into a thriller you can watch frame by frame

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When cameras outrun time

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What happens when a camera hits two billion frames per second? You stop filming moments and start filming the gaps between them. At this speed, a beam of light crawls across a room like a slow comet, mirrors bend paths like plot twists, and “now” stretches just enough to peek into “a split-second ago.”

The build sounds almost like a dare: one mirror, one lens, two tubes, a nest of cables, a custom flash, and a few hundred lines of Python. The genius isn’t brute force; it’s a clever cheat. Instead of recording a full image at once, the system captures a one-pixel video at unimaginable speed, then scans across the scene with a precision mirror. Tile enough of those ultra-fast pixel videos together and you get HD footage that lets you literally watch light move.

The upgrades are satisfyingly nerdy: belt-driven gimbals with encoders for rock-solid pointing, a pinhole that defines pixel size, and a photomultiplier tube sensitive enough to count photons—synchronized by an oscilloscope gobbling data at giga samples per second. The first three paragraphs are the teaser. The real mind-bend begins when the footage breaks your intuition…

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