59:31The Single Observation That Shattered 2,000 Years Of Science
Jim Al-Khalili presents part one of the documentary Everything and Nothing, tracing how a species stuck on one planet worked out the size, shape, and age of the whole universe. It starts with the supernova of 1572, a new star in heavens that were supposed to be unchanging, and with Thomas Digges, who responded four years later by redrawing Copernicus's diagram with the shell of fixed stars broken open and the stars scattered into infinite space. That single edit created a question nobody could answer for 400 years: if space is infinite and full of stars, why is the night sky dark? The film follows the answer through the Herschels grinding metal mirrors in Bath, Bessel's first parallax measurement and the wall it hits, Henrietta Leavitt's Cepheid yardstick, Hubble finding one blinking star in Andromeda, and then Euclid, Gauss, Riemann, and Einstein turning gravity into the shape of space. The resolution turns out to be the finite age of the universe, and the film closes on the 1998 supernova result, dark energy, and a sky that will keep emptying.
