The Pleasure of Slow Motion
Last weekend I watched hours worth of
An event that would have taken a few hundredths of a second now takes seconds or even minutes to occur. We’re familiar with the photos of bullets going through apples from our childhood and we’re familiar with the footage of
The video above shows the action in such slow motion that you can see everything that happens in a way that a live broadcast never could. Eight minutes from ignition to the moment the rocket leaves the shot.
In this
In the video above you see paint being flung from a drill in slow motion. The paint is flung upwards and sideways. You also see the drill as it oscillates up and down as well as from side to side. In
In another
In another video, you can watch what happens when a drop of water falls into a body of water, how it goes down into the water, bounces back out and then hits another drop. Such motion is really interesting to watch. In real-time, we’re speaking of hundredths of a second but in slow motion, we’re speaking about seconds of motion.
In the video above we see how surface tension and bubbles of water interact. You start from a single drop of water that falls from a surface, bounces on the top of water multiple times and as it bounces halves and then halves again several times before finally disappearing into the water. This is behaviour that you would never notice with the naked eye but thanks to slow motion cameras you see it.
When you watch the first slow-motion videos you don’t know what to expect but as you watch dozens, or even hundreds of events so you begin to understand how the world works at the nanosecond timescale. They’re worth watching
