Watch a pulse of light at a trillion frames per second

So, at MIT they made a high speed camera that can capture a trillion frames per second and that's fast enough to watch a pulse of light in slow motion. Crazy. How did they do this, you ask? They use a bunch of light sensors that are slow on their own, but are timed to take a picture one trillionth of a second apart. To reduce the number of sensors that they needed to use they took photos that were only about a pixel high and as wide as their scene. Then scanned the whole scene from top to bottom with the camera. Since the light pulse was a highly repeatable event, they could do a bunch of trials and then mesh all of the line videos together. I JUST SAW LIGHT! Yeah, whatever, I see light 16 hours a day.

My Unfounded Theories 2: Where does the time go?

So, how's the space-time continuum been treating you lately? This is my standard greeting when I'm feeling a little bit pompous. Well, time is pretty crazy when you think about it. It's the fourth dimension, it's the first non-spatial one (the second one is possibilities? Ah, who knows), but mathematically it can pretty much just be lumped with the spatial ones. People have pondered about what time is for all of humanity, so don't expect a definitive conclusion from this post. The problem seems to be that we really have no way of probing time. For probing space, we have things like the LHC and telescopes, but nothing of the like for time. We know it slows down as you move faster thanks to that Einstein, but not much else. Are we just moving along one time-path in a sea of infinite, or even finite, possible time paths? Do our decisions dictate our path, or is it predetermined? And this is the problem. Thinking about time gets speculative very quickly, and it is tough to reel back in.

Emulsions

Emulsions are pretty much everywhere. Some example are milk, mayonnaise, vinaigrettes, creams and lotions. So what exactly is an emulsion? Well, it is a mixture of two immiscible liquids. What are immiscible liquids? They are liquids that do not mix in all proportions. Huh, aren't those conflicting statements? Kind of, but no. Immiscible liquids don't mix on the molecular level, but they become dispersed in each other.Oil and water are the most common set of immiscible liquids, but there are many others. In fact, you can make multiphasic emulsions that are comprised of a set of more than two mutually immiscible liquids. For example, liquid silicone is immiscible with both oil and water. Neat stuff.

A good example of an emulsion is a vinaigrette. If you shake it up you see the little balls of vinegar in the oil. This is what happens in milk too, but the balls of fat are so small that you can't see them with your naked eye. But milk doesn't separate, so how can milk and vinaigrettes both be emulsions? A vinaigrette is an example of an unstable emulsion because it separates over time and milk is an example of a stable emulsion. Milk is not naturally stable, but it has been stabilized through the use of proteins that lie on the fat-water interface. Emulsions can also be stabilized with particles, in which case they are called Pickering emulsions (as are emulsions stabilized with proteins), or they can be stabilized with surfactants (e.g. soap).

Globules of dark matter in space

And now it's time for the crazy talk that will be forgotten to the sands of time, but I actually hope someone says, wow, that's not half bad. So, similar to my musing in my foam post, you could do the whole poppin' possibilities thing with emulsion coalescence (when to oil bubbles merge and form a larger bubble). But reeling it in a bit, but only a little bit, if you think of matter and  dark matter as a set of immiscible liquids...we live in an emulsion! Maybe even a multiphasic one with matter, antimatter and empty space all being immiscible? Above is a picture of a slice of the dark matter in the universe. Just something to think about.