FASTER THAN A SPEEDING PHOTON: The World’s Fastest Camera Shoots Five Trillion Photos Every Second.

At those speeds, events that take place in as little as 0.2 trillionths of a second can be documented and studied at a speed that humans can comprehend. To help demonstrate just how fast that really is, the researchers used the new camera to film a group of photons traveling about as far as a piece of paper is thick, making it seem as if the light particles were barely moving, instead of racing past at 671 million miles per hour.

As you might imagine, the technology that allows cameras like this to capture so many frames every second is radically different to how film cameras, or even modern digital cameras, work. The camera doesn’t actually snap away for a full second—capturing five trillion frames that quickly would require a roll of film that was miles long. Besides, the events it’s designed to capture are over in less than a picosecond; about one trillionth the time it takes you to say “one Mississippi.”

Instead, the record-breaking high-speed camera uses another innovative trick to achieve its astounding speeds. Every frame of film that’s recorded actually contains four separate images, captured one after the other, created by flashing a laser at the subject with each light pulse featuring a unique ‘code’ that allows the combined images to be later decoded and separated using an encryption key.

I still haven’t caught up editing the photos from my son’s football games last fall, shot at a somewhat slower 6.5 frames per second.