But surely an experiment that was performed according to the method didn't "Fail" it just produced unexpected results.

I'm not sure an experiment that produces unexpected results should be called a failed experiment. If the outcome is known with some certainty beforehand, isn't it a demonstration, like the one you performed in this video? Good stuff, as always. Thanks for posting.

The Michelson-Morley experiment was a huge achievement back in 1887. While simple in principle, the details are daunting. Now I have to go and read up on how they got coherent light back then.

Okay, finding low-tech simple ways to show us these amazing things about the world around us is something you are just really good at, you really just strip experiments down to their basic principles, it helps a lot! I can only imagine how many junior high and high school science teachers must follow you. Thank you so much!

Failed experiment proved that the Earth is stationary.

Interesting note about the original Michaleson-Morley experiments: Although they could and did use monochromatic light (sodium flame) for calibration, they used white light for the actual experiment, so that they could use the colored fringes of the interference pattern. Apparently this helped them compensate for some of the vibrations caused by passing horse traffic.

6:30 Does anyone else hear the phantom voice that sounds like it's saying "ya, know"?

That's so cool! Please make more videos about light interferometry, been really curious about it since the gravity wave detection a few years back. Seeing practical experiments like this really help people understand the mechanics of these experiments. Very cool. Thank you!

Man! Took me back to my Physics undergrad days; Modern Physics was one of the courses I most enjoyed! My professor introduced these historical moments in such an engaging way! Thanks for your content!

Do you think the flexing of the acrylic vacuum chamber as the pressure changed affected the light beam?

It was an experiment, but not a failed experiment. A failed experiment would have failed to represent reality.

Great video! I really enjoy your content. To take this topic a step further, I am interested in an explaination of Michelson-Morely result when put in the context of the Sagnac experiment.

Brilliant as always. I always learn and understand something brand new in every episode. Thank you action lab!

As always i never heared about this experiment but thank for sharing:)

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …” - Isaac Asimov

I remember doing the Young's double-slit experiment back in my engg days. Those fringes are so beautiful.

1:27 "Kamikoto is having their Valentine sale now..." "Ah yes, what a better gift than a knife collection for Valentine?" -Serial Killer in love

This experiment showed that the earth is stationary 💯

Video aside, I love how much mileage you're getting out of that vacuum chamber!

I believe that this is your best video within the last 2-3 months. Well done!

Hey Action lab!!! I love your videos a lot and learn new interesting things..... Opening the world of science... 😀😀😀 A small request from my side -->an you please make a working of HYPERLOOP and explain the mechanism of it😃

This is WAY beyond my pay grade. You always do a fine job of explaining.

Thank you for properly explaining this experiment. So many people get this wrong

Hey Action Lab! Love your videos long time fan! Can you do a video on Galvanic Cells and Voltaic piles. What are the best metals for best results? What metals will last the longest through the redox effect? Also can you coat the metals with Hydro-phobic coating and still achieve the redox effect? What are the best catalyst fluids? What is the most powerful Pile you can make? What could you power with it? lights? toys? Tesla Coil? Thanks.

I love educational videos like this ❤❤

You are doing awesome video's keep it up...

Waves travel through mediums. This is the intuitive reason behind the theoretical aether. The more we learn about the quantum world, the more we find we have a need to reinvestigate the possibility of an aether.

Your videos teach me so much more than any of the educational institutes i studied at 💯🔥 another amazing video 🔥

Light don't travel,. It just expands. It's not a wave or photons! It's just the instant of creation of space..

Who else notice the "They're moved" voice at 6:31 🤣

Thank you, I never new about this.

Nice! Real Physics at home. Lov' It. Thanks.

Very brilliant experiment

The innterferometer it’s also the device used in to holographic making, and that refractive interference its one way to measure deformation in nanometric materials

The Michaelson-Morley experiment is famous, not because it failed, but because it was a resounding success. It's purpose was not to measure the motion of the earth through the ether, or to prove the ether existed. It's purpose was to test the existence of the ether, and if it existed, to measure the earth's motion through it. The experiment was so successful because it was so well designed that its results were conclusive.

What I love about science is that nothing is taken for granted, not even Galileian relativity, which scientists have believed in for so long. If it wasn’t for this experiment, god knows how long it would have taken humanity to figure out special, let alone general relativity. Someone half a century later would probably be wondering why their GPS isn’t working correctly.

Thanks for the video! Lesson learnt is that there's no failed experiment. It's only a failure of how to explain it correctly.

0:56 Pun intended?

wow way cool, loved it

I have made my research about these Kamikoto knives. They are made in China and their price inflation policy is very scamy. You can get those on amazon for half the price of their eshop.

James, you make physics fun. This brought back some memories of U of M.

Michelson and Morley actually tried to build a gravitational wave detector, but decided to call it the search for aether experiment instead :D

That was one your best videos

It's nice videos and gets lots information

The voice at 6:31 scared me, jesus

This is so awesome

No one can test the speed of light in our current technology

what about the glass in between beam splitter and the vacuum chamber.. that will also change the calculation for refractive index..right?

What do GMO's have to do with destructive interference? Well even if they don't it's still crazy to to hear that at the 6:31 point of the video.

I was just stuck on tic toc for an hour and a half, I felt so dumb I came to youtube searching for The Action Lab 😂😂🤪

dude, you are too good

What effect does constant rotation (around the vertical axes, horizontal axes) or accelerated rotation have on your fringes? (Rotation will of course mechanically change the length of the optical paths, but I still wonder whether one would see something unexpected).

I was a bit unclear on some of the things you said, so I searched it up to find a more in-depth answer. A quora page came up, no surprise there. (The question was “why does light travel at the same speed from all perspectives”). The surprise came when I saw that the top answer was worded very similarly to how this video was explained. Using the same “the most famous failed experiment” phrase, talking about light (not) travelling through aether, the Michelson Morley experiment… I’m not sure, but I feel like I found the inspiration for this video.

An experiment"s purpose is to test a hypothesis. The hypothesis failed, the experiment was a success.

I really like the way he teaches physics with practical experience.

I'm curious where did you purchase your interferometer from, and how much was it?

why does the knife take several years?

0:51 REAL PEN?!?!?! WOW!!!

Light doesn't move, time emerges.

The Michelson-Morley Experiment still lives on in modern FT-IR spectrometers. Instead of browsing through all wavelengths of radiation, which takes a lot of time, all wavelengths are measures simultaneously, with the intensity of each wavelength being calculated using interference and Fourier Transformation.

This is a genius demonstration.

I think your set up could be showing the very slight flex in the bottom piece of polycarbonate from your vacuum chamber, that very small flex would change the mirrors distance and overpower the actual speed difference. Maybe do this experiment again but some how isolate the mirror from being effected by the walls or top or bottom of your vacuum chamber, or build a very strong granite or steel plate as a replacement for the bottom, those would have way less flex. Just an idea

I saw your full sponsor without skiping it. idk why I saw it 😂

So we're basically back to trying to detect the eather, right? Timespace bending gravitational waves and stuff

I've missed one of your videos but I will find it.

With them knives and the darker-than-black suit, hes prolly gonna take the ninja route.

Real video starts at 1:45

Not sure is 6:30 was an alternate experiment but that caught me off guard.

Action lab is the best channel

Wow ive literally been thinking about this for the last hour, then I jump on KZfaq and boom there it is.

Very nice. My only complaint is saying a gravitational wave could pass one of LIGO's arms. The waves were 30,000 km -ish in wavelength, so both arms are hit. They're at 90 degrees, so one gets longer and one gets shorter, which doubles the signal....that's because it's tensor polarization, because gravitons are spin 2, unlike spin 1 vector polarization of light. It's all very geometric.

2:23 So the ether was the force lol.

Lovely vid

The experiment says they used a sodium flame to align the mirrors, but used a regular oil lamp for the experiment. I'd be very interested in seeing how they ran these experiments before they had coherent, monochromatic light sources, to see how interference fringes are created with white light.

I read about this in a book 2 months ago!

6:30 oh no...

Can you please make a video on an experiment to trap light inside perfectly angled mirrors in a vacuum

6:30 did you hear that..LOL

"I just needa adjust my mirrors a little-" PANADOL CAN RELIEVE ALLERGY SYMPTOMS

Can you make a video talking about how everything physical doesn’t have any color to it. It’s only when light is present that objects or anything has color because of reflecting a certain wavelength of the light hitting it, making it look a certain color. But without light nothing has any color at all. I think there is certain tests you can do as well by shining a different color flash light at a object that reflects a different color. Like shining a true red wavelength flash light on something that’s green.

Didn't understand a single thing but COOOOL

You should look at the crush metric pen i would love to see the science behind it

Was gonna say I hope it wasn't Shroedinger's cat.

Since the mirror moved when you pumped the box down, how do we know the patterns aren't just from the mirror moving back to its original position as you allow air in? Where's your control?

Imagine if he was our Physics teacher !😂😂

6:30 Ohh god tht sound is creepy

There has been some question about if the speed of light has not been a constant and is slowing down, which would fit a universe subject to the laws of thermodynamics, entropy, etc. A watch once wound up is running down.

that was so great !!!

I don't know how to feel about having a valentines discount on knives

Can you do experiment showing LC OSCILLATION

Me still lost... but love to watch your content🙂

Thats pretty crazy .

Technically it would be the index of refraction of the lexan of the box, plus the index of the vacuum right?

Do the Michelson Morley experiment.

Perfect timing. Video uploaded during break time at work.

Great!

I very much like it when you upload more straightforward videos. All your videos are good, but some are ruined by clickbaity captions. Thankfully this wasn't. Another thing I love about your videos is the bonus information at the end of a video. In this video it was the gravitational waves. Fun fact, same interferometer was used to create a perfect sphere of silicon used to define avagadros number and subsequently the definition of one kilogram. However another method was eventually used.

Some people watching this and saw the ad about knives, dude we're scientist

I have a weird question, and I'm not sure how to adequately word it. The speed of light changes based off of the material it moves through (air/gas/etc.). We also see that gravity can compress space-time, which makes it appear from an outside reference that light slows down. My question is: does the photon actually slow down going through the medium, or is it just our perception from an outside reference that makes it appear that it slows down? In other words, is the speed of light constant from the reference of the photon regardless of medium?

Cool! But 'most famous failed experiment'? The experiment shows differences in light speeds in different material densities, but i'm not entirely clear on how this disproves 'aether'; what *should* it look like if there was such a thing as a 'luminiferous aether'? i'd heard of this but it didn't strike me as being all that big a deal. Classic physics already had a huge first nail in the coffin. One that made a bigger impression on me was the 'Black Body Ultraviolet Catastrophe' (ya, sounds like maybe a collaboration between Andy Warhol and film director Luis Buñuel...). Sir Arthur Eddington talked about it in 'The Nature of the Physical World' (great book if you can find it, collected from his lectures, puts some serious Physics in plain English, fairly easy reading and still relevant today and a great bit of science history as well; you can see Eddington's visibly shaken by the implications of Heiseberg's discovery of the 'Indeterminacy Principle' at a time when it looked as if physics was on the cusp of knowing everything there was to know about the workings of the Universe). He talks about how someone in the late 1800s conducted a 'Black Body Radiation' experiment which failed to produce the Classically predicted results (likely a good thing it failed or London might well still be nothing more than a smoldering crater) which was the beginning of the end of Newtonian physics and lead to Plank coming up with the correct description of various energies not being continuous but having smallest possible finite sizes. That's a pretty famous 'failed experiment' too.