Michio Kaku Explains How Revealing The Super Camera May Be

Photo: M. Scott Brauer

In December last year, a team at MIT released an incredible video of "the worlds fastest camera".  Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar set up can capture actually capture individual photons by capturing a trillion-frames-per-second.
To produce a video that captures moving photons, the scientists used a streak camera, which is normally used to measure light in intensity and time. A streak camera, however, reduces a scene into a single-dimensional slit by deflecting protons with an electrical field, ao the video is actually a combination of trillions of slit images.
Now, a Big Think video with Michio Kaku helps further explore the significance of this development.  According to Kaku, the timescale of the brain is based on chemical reactions, so the camera allows us to see the universe very differently in terms of time scale - so different it is beyond human comprehension.  
Seeing things at billionth of a second may allow us to see things such as chemical reactions as they take place.
A whole new realm of science may be opened up, for instance we still do not have a thorough understanding of photosynthesis, but cameras like this may open up a gateway of understanding.  


The original MIT video of the camera: