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A laser pointer at 2B FPS [video]

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615 points thunderbong | 1 comments | 19 Oct 25 06:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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MostlyStable ◴[20 Oct 25 22:18 UTC] No.45650133[source]▶
As I understand it, this is sort of simulating what it would be like to capture this, by recreating the laser pulse and capturing different phases of it each time, then assembling them; so what is represented in the final composite is not a single pulse of the laser beam.

Would an upgraded version of this that was actually capable of capturing the progress of a single laser pulse through the smoke be a way of getting around the one-way speed of light limitation [0]? It seems like if you could measure the pulse's propagation in one direction, and the other (as measured by when it scatters of the smoke at various positions in both directions), this seems like it would get around it?

But it's been a while since I read an explanation for why we have the one-way limitation in the first place, so I could be forgetting something.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light

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1. monster_truck ◴[20 Oct 25 23:51 UTC] No.45650856[source]▶
Think of it more like "IRL raytracing", where a ray (the beam) is cast and the result for a single pixel from the point of view is captured, and then it is repeated millions of times.

Even if you had a clock and camera for every pixel, the sync is dependent on the path of the signal taken. Even if you sent a signal along every possible route and had a clock for each route for each pixel (a dizzingly large number) it still isn't clear that this would represent a single inertial frame. As I understand it even if you used quantum entanglement for sync, the path of the measurement would still be an issue. I suggest not thinking about this at all, it seems like an effective way to go mad https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0202031

E: Do not trust my math under any circumstances but I believe the number of signal paths would be something like 10^873,555? That's a disgustingly large number. This would reveal whether the system is in a single inertial frame (consistency around loops), but it does not automatically imply a single inertial frame. It's easy to forget that the earth, galaxy, etc are also still rotating while this happens.