I stole it from somewhere else, but it was posted today.

Part 2 was posted on March 28 - a day later than the one in the OP.

felltoearth wrote:The video in the OP is so much better though. Figures that Cal Tech would make a better show of it.

One thing they missed in the OP vid though still by my tiny mind is how the laser was designed to emit such an incredibly short burst..mind boggling stuff

Would it be possible to capture individual photons?

I like how it still runs on Windows.

felltoearth wrote:

I'm With Stupid wrote:I like how it still runs on Windows.

XP?

I think someone in the comments said it was Windows 7, which to be fair, was the best one. Although XP was good too.

DougC wrote:Would it be possible to capture individual photons?

I'm not sure I know what this means - but I'll have a go... A pulse of laser light is, by definition, an amplification by stimulated emission of photons in a chamber. The laser pulse of (very many photons) then travels along, say, an x-axis whilst in order to be observed, some of the photons in that pulse must be scattered out of the x-y plane (by a milky solution in this case) and into the detector (or observer's eye). As far as I'm aware (but I could be wrong), human eyes cannot detect individual blue photons and any detector that does detect a single photon would have to amplify that signal in order to be observed by a human.

Thanks.
What I was clumsily asking, is would it be possible to liberate one photon from a beam and have it travel through the bottle.

Single photon production is possible:


The single photon could then be made to enter a bottle. It would need to be scattered to be detected off-axis though... Takes me back to x-ray diffraction experiments with a circular band of photographic film around a central sample...e.g.