Stopping Time: Guest Event with Eric Mazur
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June 04, 2007
Open videoWhen you watch sports on TV and a replay gets shown in "slow motion," you can see things happening that you couldn't see before. If the replay is slowed to a stop, it becomes a still image showing a single moment in time.
A similar technique is used by scientists who want to see what nature is doing, but can't because it's happening too fast. Harvard physicist Eric Mazur is one of these scientists who observes the world by "stopping time."
In this talk, Eric reviews some history of how previous scientists have stopped time, and gives a sense of just how slow state-of-the-art "slow motion" can get. He also talks about his current research, which investigates the strange things that happen when you blast things with flashes of laser light that last only a few femtoseconds (millionths of billionths of a second).
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