59:31From Torricelli's Tube to Dirac's Vacuum: How Nothing Shapes the Universe
A full length documentary that treats emptiness as the most important thing in the universe, and walks four hundred years of experiment to make the case. It runs from Aristotle's ruling that nature abhors a vacuum, through Torricelli's mercury tube in the 1640s that made a void and weighed the atmosphere in the same object, to Pascal carrying that tube up a tower and discovering that the ocean of air has a top. The middle act builds the luminiferous ether as a reasonable inference and then demolishes it with Michelson and Morley in 1887, a null result so unwelcome that the men who got it called their own experiment a failure. The last act is Heisenberg and Paul Dirac refilling the void a third time with virtual particles, confirmed by the Lamb shift to one part in a million, and ends by arguing that the lumps WMAP photographed in the early universe are the scars of that fizzing vacuum, and that everything solid is the one particle in a billion that survived annihilation.