YouTuber captures the speed of light using a 2-billion-frames-per-second camera and nobody’s ever seen anything like it

The speed of light is one of those things you learn about in school but never expect to actually see happening.

But one YouTuber has done something absolutely wild: he built a homemade setup that lets him film light itself as it moves.

In fact, his camera system is so advanced that it can record at an unbelievable two billion frames per second.

The resulting video is pretty wild and unlike anything the internet has ever seen.

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Capturing the speed of light with a homemade setup

The magic behind the setup isn’t a giant Hollywood camera or a million-dollar lab.

It’s actually much weirder and far more creative.

Instead of filming everything at once like a normal camera, YouTuber AlphaPhoenix films one tiny dot, or pixel, at a time.

He shines a laser into the scene, and when the light bounces back, a super-sensitive sensor picks it up and sends a tiny blip to an oscilloscope, which is basically a high-speed graphing machine.

That little blip tells him how long the light took to make the trip.

One direction equals one pixel.

Hundreds of thousands of directions equal a full picture.

What’s even crazier is that light does its whole journey across his garage in maybe 20 or 30 billionths of a second.

That’s so fast it might as well be teleporting.

But the oscilloscope takes 200 thousandths of a second just to show it on the screen.

That’s ten million times slower than the event he’s recording.

By the time he sees the light pulse on the display, the actual photon that caused it has already come and gone ages ago.

But that delay doesn’t matter, because he uses the laser itself as a ‘start now!’ trigger.

Every time the laser fires, the machine knows exactly when to begin counting.

That’s how he’s able to line up all those one-pixel recordings perfectly.

Amazing feat with almost no resources

After he’s collected them all, he feeds the data into his computer, which assembles them into a single video, which is basically a flipbook made of tiny light-timing measurements.

The end result is jaw-dropping: you can actually watch light crawl across the frame like a glowing ripple.

It looks like something from a sci-fi movie, except it’s completely real.

And remember, this wasn’t filmed in a lab at NASA or MIT; it was filmed in a garage, by a guy with a laser, albeit with boundless ingenuity and plenty of patience.

Perhaps the most surprising thing?

He isn’t even the only one trying to capture the speed of light on camera, although these guys did use special equipment procured from the California Institute of Technology.