Hi, we've got three stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you'll learn about the most famous failed experiment in history,

how to tell if you're a covert narcissist, and the Monte Hall problem, which might break your brain.

Let's satisfy some curiosity on the brain-breaking Curiosity Daily.

Our first story today is about the Michelson-Morley experiment, which changed the way we think about physics.

And the best part is that the experiment was actually a failure.

Most famous failed experiment in history? You decide.

Around the start of the 19th century,

physicists had the idea that there was a substance pervading the universe.

According to them, waves like sound and light needed a medium to travel

through, so they came up with the idea of ether. You've maybe seen it spelled A-E-T-H-E-R and had some kind of strange properties. Supposedly you could find ether everywhere, but it didn't actually interact with physical matter at all.

Oh, and ether had a quote unquote wind or Ether flow.

You know how you feel wind when you stick your hand out of a car window,

even if there's no breeze that day?

Well, that's kind of how Ether flow worked

around the planet's surface. Well, in 1887, some physicists started to think that ether only carried light waves,

and two physicists designed an experiment to prove it, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. They had the idea that the flow of ether could

affect how fast light moved through it. Here's the basic idea. Think about two

swimmers that race down a river for a hundred meters.

Well, if they swim at the exact same speed, only one is swimming upstream and the other is

swimming downstream, then the one swimming downstream will get to the finish faster.

Michael said and Morley figured the same should be true of light traveling through the

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