Time Warp

Discovery Channel

Do you know how your dog uses its tongue to drink or what happens when an egg falls into the pinwheeling blades of a fan? Likely, with nothing but your naked eye to guide you, you haven’t got a clue. In fact, there are countless events the world has to offer that our limited senses can’t fully appreciate — until now, anyway. In “Time Warp”, MIT scientist and teacher Jeff Lieberman, along with digital-imaging expert Matt Kearney, uses new technologies to bring truly never-before-seen wonders into a form that your body can actually process.

“Time Warp” captured common everyday events and viewed them again in slow motion to uncover the many principles of physics. To do so, they examined things such as a drop of water, explosions (many of them), gunshots, ballet dancing, cornflour, shallow water diving, X games and sometimes some uncanny things like piercing one’s cheek or standing on blades.

The high speed cameras were used at as low as 500 frame/second for capturing how dogs drink to as high as 40,000 frame/second for capturing bullets, breaking glass, etc. Speeds above 20,000 frame/second were shot in black and white as the data for lightness and darkness is reduced when there is no color (hue) value to shoot. This is because the recording was digital and so the frame rate is limited to a certain data rate and black-and-white footage is much smaller (in memory space) than full color.

Using the latest in high-speed photography, the “Time Warp” team takes natural and not-so- natural events and turns them into a thing of both beauty and learning.