Bullets of light. And the other sort.

Wow: a milimeter-long pulse of laser light caught with a camera taking images at a trillion frames per second.

Description from the site:

Volumetric Propagation: The pulse of light is less than a milimeter long. Between each frame, the pulse travels less than half a milimeter. Light travels a foot in a nanosecond and the duration of travel through a one foot long bottle is barely one nanosecond (one billiongth of a second).

There’s complete description of how they do this, along with other videos and images of this effect, there at the MIT site. To see a bunch of great high speed video of actual bullets, check out the work done by Brass Fetcher.

Jim Downey

Via MeFi. Cross posted to my personal blog.