00:00For a hundred years, physicists have known what will happen if you try to photograph an object that's traveling at
00:05the speed of light.
00:06It's called the Terrell-Penrose effect.
00:09What will happen is that since light itself has to travel to the object going at light speed,
00:14it won't reach the object in the way that it would if we were photographing something standing still in front
00:20of us.
00:21Instead, the light will be coming back from the object at a slightly different position than where it actually was
00:30going to strike the object if it were still.
00:33In effect, what happens is that the object will appear like it's turned slightly towards us.
00:38So if you had a cube face on and you photograph it sitting still, you'll just see the side of
00:43the cube.
00:44But if it were traveling at light speed and you photographed it, you would have it turned about like so.
00:51This effect is, of course, only theoretical, or it was until now,
00:55because it's impossible to get something moving at the speed of light or to get your camera moving that fast.
01:00So what researchers did at the University of Vienna, Technical University of Vienna,
01:05is to photograph the object in little thin slices.
01:10So by stitching these images together with lasers and simulating the passage of the object at light speed
01:17and knitting together thousands and thousands of these images,
01:20they were able to recreate the effect of the object being turned in space just as it would at the
01:26speed of light,
01:27essentially proving a hundred-year-old theory.
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