Mysteries of the Unseen World Page #2

through the average movie camera

at 90 feet a minute,

Edgerton's flicker box

can handle 125 feet a second.

In normal speed movies,

a bullet shot from the muzzle

of a high-powered air gun

is invisible.

Now Edgerton really

photographs a bullet in flight.

Watch it come in from the left-.

Here, fascinating patterns

of movement.

And when you recall that

all the action of this bulb smashing

actually took place

in the fraction of a second,

you realize that here is speed

in movie photography, indeed!

High-speed cameras

do the opposite of time-lapse.

They shoot images thousands,

or even millions of times

faster than our vision.

When played back

at 24 images per second...

they show us remarkable

things we normally miss.

When you see drops

hit the water,

here's what you don't see.

Every drop bounces like a ball.

Held together

by surface tension,

it continues to get smaller

and smaller.

This happens every time

a raindrop hits a puddle.

A hundred times every second,

lightning strikes

somewhere on Earth.

Little was known about lightning

till high-speed cameras turned

the research upside down.

Literally.

What our eyes see

is energy flowing downward

from the clouds.

Now we can see

that electricity also moves

upward from the ground.

If we can see lightning bolts...

We can see almost anything

that's lightning-fast.

When a dragonfly flutters by,

you may not realize

it's the greatest flyer in nature.

It can hover...

fly backwards...

and even upside down.

No one knew the secret.

But high speed shows

that a dragonfly can move

all four wings

in different directions

at the same time.

No aircraft can do this.

If we can see how nature's

ingenious devices work...

we can imitate them.

By tracking markers

on an insect's wings,

we can visualize

the airflow they produce.

What we learn could lead us

to new kinds of robotic flyers

that expand our vision

of important events

in remote places.

How many secrets remain

to be discovered

in the super-fast worlds of nature?

We move through

the landscape like giants,

unaware of the wonders

too small for us to see.

Long ago, we noticed

that a glass sphere

made things appear larger.

Grinding it down into a lens

magnified objects even more.

Stacking lenses in a tube

greatly multiplied the effect,

and the compound microscope

was born.

It let us peer into a world

we'd never seen before.

Suddenly, we could see

creatures in common pond water

that we didn't

even know existed.

But there is a limitation

to the compound microscope.

We can't see down

into the scales of the butterfly's wing

because visible light waves

are too big.

Everything smaller

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