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Wednesday, February 12, 2014

A missed moment.


This morning on the way to work I saw several picturesque qualities to the sky and air. I try to keep a camera with me as much as possible, but, true to form, I didn't have a camera ready today.

There was a glistening fog today. The temperatures were well below zero. The sun was coming up over the local hills and the fog had a double rainbow. An unusual double rainbow as they weren't very long or tall I should say. And then on top of that, as the sun hid behind the mountains, the most amazing sundog stretched way up into the sky, and it only lasted a couple minutes and was gone.

I made a mistake again as usual. No camera, and I was a little bit late to work, so I wouldn't have had time anyway to stop and take the picture.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

high speed photography

I read as much as I can to stay informed about new technology in a number of different areas. In the last couple of years some interesting new developments have started to take place around high speed photography.

A high speed camera can take multiple frames of images quickly. The question is, what kind of range can be achieved? It is impressive what can be done now, from the single shot camera that can be set to take more than a single exposure, to cameras that are designed to take thousands of frames per second, to a camera developed recently by MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that can take one trillion frames per second.

I first became interested in this when reading about a new camera development, the one above that can take a trillion frames per second, click here for more on this.
At a trillion frames per second this camera has been reported capable of recording the movement of light. One article I read describes one use of this ability. You could, or rather you will be able to, the example explains, put the camera around a corner from an open doorway, flash a light for a millionth of a second, and as the light goes out and bounces around the room on the other side of the doorway, an image of what the inside of that room looks like can be reported. In other words, a new kind of radar for imaging anything that reflects light.

I think it is fair to say that high speed photography, then, has come into a new age.

But, what I report above isn't the only new interesting development.

When I started learning about high speed cameras, I first came across the Flex/Phantom line of cameras.

Then I found Fastec.

And then I found this, the Edgertronic.

What's the difference?

The immediate difference is pricing. The Edgertronic comes in at 6 thousand US Dollars.

Compare that to the others. I checked for a price on a Flex/Phantom and what I got back doing a quick Google search was to rent a Phantom for two weeks off Ebay will cost 2 thousand US Dollars. There are Phantom shops around the world that can make them available readily.

But for the price of 6 weeks of renting a Flex/Phantom, one can BUY an Edgertronic.

In my college courses on TV and Radio production we were taught that if you don't need the equipment all the time to simply rent it, and always use other peoples' money to do so. If you use your own money for production, you slide over into the artist for art's sake category, and making a return on your investment is something you can sacrifice.

'Having stated that, I think if I had the $6,000.00 to spare, I might purchase an Edgertronic.

Ultimately, I'd like the opportunity to compare all of the above sometime, and then give you a hands-on review.

-CB


Addendum, conjecture and possibly a hypotheses to the above:

Sometimes I hate the last few minutes of the day as my mind kind of runs unbridled and odd thoughts and ideas come into my mind. Which means I have to get back up out of bed and go write them down so as to not forget them.

For about 22 years I have surmised that invisibility is possible. I have described a crude method a couple of times to some local scientist attached to Corning, Incorporated, as I live here, grew up here, and believe they to be the most interested in such topics. This thinking has also lead me to believe that a computer that runs on light is possible. Well, research shows that quantum processing is on the table.And always when I broach the topics people dismiss me. I even wrote to a Doctor in the US Naval Weapons research area about this invisibility stuff and he ridiculed me by writing to the former owner of the local glass manufacturer, who in turn referred to my idea as a kind of "Buck Rogers" suit.

If you say so.

So I am laying in bed this evening and my mind wraps around the words above, a trillion frames per second.

Fast enough to catch the propagation of light. Fast enough to image a room around the corner and beyond a doorway if a proper pickup was made available.

So.

Turn this thinking around.

The term is referred to as electro-magnetic permeability.

There it is, up there, a trillion frames per second.

Invisibility. It is the essence of the SR-71. It can out run its own ordinance.

That camera up there can out run light, or, in other words, the electro-magnetic spectrum.

If you can do that...

You can turn something electro-magnetically invisible. If you have the proper pickup available.

And can then re-broadcast that to the other side of anything you want to"bend" light around.

That's the elite version of the crude method I proposed 22 years ago.

The real version... passing the electro-magnetic spectrum through molecules...

probably isn't that far away either now.



2nd Addendum to above:

Like I said, the last few minutes before going to sleep.

I have also been paying attention, albeit in my crude way, to this conversation about matching quantum states as a kind of quantum teleportation.

The idea being that if you can make an atom here spin in exactly the same way as an atom over there, you have them mimicking each other's quantum state.

So... you get all the atoms and/or molecules in matched quantum states on either side of something you want to make invisible, call it a state of matter wherein electro-magnetic transference via quantum state exists, photons arrive on one side but are emitted at the other side because the mutual quantum state exists.

And then cobble that together with a trillion times a second.

Perhaps, one level elite higher than the above, and an order twice as high as the original crude method mentioned 22 years ago.

I can see it, can you?