A YouTube creator working out of his garage has engineered something that is normally found only in major research facilities: a camera capable of filming a laser beam moving at the speed of light.
Rather than announcing his technical achievement in an academic journal or press release, materials scientist Brian Haidet published his creation publicly on his YouTube channel AlphaPhoenix. Historically, “light-in-flight” demonstrations were almost exclusively conducted in specialized laboratories, including the one-trillion-frames-per-second experiment conducted at MIT in 2011.
In that experiment, capturing light in motion required streak cameras and femtosecond lasers within a controlled laboratory setting. The results were then presented to the public through an MIT News article and press materials, which framed the technology as “an imaging system that makes light look slow.”
The public-facing release, of course, did not reveal the trial-and-error that went into building the system. In contrast, Haidet’s recent work in his garage sits at the opposite end of that spectrum. He captures the speed of light in a way that conceptually approximates the MIT results using off-the-shelf parts and open-source tools in his garage.
In the video, Haidet explains how his home-built setup doesn’t capture a full video all at once. Instead, it records the phenomenon by measuring a single point in space at a time. By firing the same laser pulse repeatedly, Haidet’s camera captures movement by measuring the time it takes for the light to pass through the lens, then shifting its line of sight by tiny increments to capture the next passing pulse.
By moving the camera along the beam’s path a single pixel at a time, Haidet’s set-up is able to measure when the light reaches each point in half-nanosecond increments; this is why the reconstructed video shows light moving in slow motion, even though the time resolution is at a rate of 2 billion per second temporal sampling.
When assembled, the finished video clearly shows a laser beam that doesn’t appear as a solid line, but as a visible chain of bright segments travelling the length of Haidet’s garage before ricocheting between two fixed mirrors. A fine mist scatters the light, giving the camera something to detect as the pulse travels roughly 6 inches per frame.
As he shifts the camera position—for example, behind the laser—the light moving away appears to crawl, while light returning to the camera appears to speed up, creating the illusion that the beam accelerates or slows, even though its true speed never changes.
“Light in any reference frame will never move any faster or any slower than this speed,” Haidet says in the video. Instead, viewers see the role of distance: light from farther points takes longer to reach the camera than light from nearby points. At an extreme frame rate, those delays become visible.
To explain why light appears to slow down and speed up in the video, Haidet walks viewers through the device’s built-in delays. By the time the system has registered that one moment in the laser’s journey, later moments are already partway through the hardware. In a camera such as the one found on mobile phones, when light bounces off a subject, it enters the lens, and the sensor records it by combining light and shadows into a single master exposure.
However, at 2 billion samples per second, that illusion is broken, and the camera is no longer just capturing a picture; it’s recording the travel time of light itself.
Light entering the camera takes “four frames of video worth of time just to move through the camera,” he says. At this scale, ‘frames’ are really time measurements, sampled billions of times per second. Inside the photomultiplier tube (a device that can detect a single photon of light and turn it into an electrical signal strong enough for a camera or instrument to measure), the signal adds another 22 nanoseconds.
In the cable, “information about 57 frames of video is moving through this camera at once,” appearing as tiny waves of voltage at different points. “If you froze time and looked at this wire, you’d see the scrunching of electrons… different frames of video at the speed of electricity,” Haidet explains. In that sense, each captured pixel in the final footage is a glimpse into a moment in the light’s past.
Fundamentally, Haidet’s video broadens access to advanced imaging by challenging the assumption that you need precision optics, dedicated laboratories, and streak cameras costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve such results.
In doing so, Haidet’s build opens a class of experiments once confined to major research facilities to public DIY culture, not by simplifying the science, but by sharing mechanical ingenuity and, as a result, also increasing transparency. His camera doesn’t just slow down the speed of light; it collapses the distance between elite research facilities and public access.
Overall, Haidet’s video is an example of how scientific ingenuity can spread in the era of content creators, circumventing academic journals and press offices to move directly from the creator to YouTube and a global audience, where a class of experiment that once lived inside major research facilities can reach other makers, inspire replication and expand scientific curiosity among people who may not have been traditionally included.
Marie Nicola is a journalist, pop culture historian, and former CBC Senior Producer whose investigative research explores the intersection of culture, technology, and history. She has contributed to the Globe and Mail, collaborated with Reddit, and been featured in TrendHunter as an early innovator in streaming and digital broadcasting. Follow her on X @karmacakedotca.