Science Goes to Hell

​by Michelle Muzzio, 2nd Year Chemistry PhD Student

If you are reading this thinking about the new film based on Dan Brown’s book Inferno, I am sorry, but you’re in the wrong place.

However, if you’re instead thinking about the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy in which Brown’s Inferno is loosely (and I mean loosely) based on, then get ready to go to hell… at least scientifically.

Sometimes people get hung up on the details of "hell" that they forget about the really scary stuff like Newtonian-based physics... before Newton was even born. Picture adapted from FreakingArG on DeviantArt.

Dante’s Inferno was written in the early 1300s. For reference, this is over two hundred years before Galileo first contemplated the stars and three hundred years before Newton dabbled in calculus, gravity, and every in between.  What then does Dante, a writer of beautiful and fantastical poetry, have to do with who we consider the first modern scientists, and thus name units of measurement after (gal and Newton)? Actually, a lot more than you might think.

When Galileo was a young math prodigy and enthusiast, he was asked by the Florentine academy to discuss and/or disprove one thing: the dimensions of hell as described by Dante. Take a moment to think of the gravity of what this means. One of the fathers of modern science was asked to speak on what can now be taught in freshmen English courses, not only to critique its aesthetic nature, but rather, to assess its scientific merit. The transcripts of this talk are easily accessed on the internet now, and highlight a fact that has been lost through centuries; the humanities were inextricably linked with science, especially when science was first attempting to find its voice.

For those not familiar (or perhaps haven’t been familiar since their high school and university English classes) with Dante’s version of hell, it is built as a descending pit of sinners. For the sake of quantification, Dante constructs nine circles of hell where the top houses low-level offenders like non-Christian poets and the bottom consists of the worst-of-the-worst like Judas, the devil himself, and of course, the non-fictional people Dante disliked enough to put in the depths of a fictional hell. Just the mere fact that Dante made this pit descending​ is significant, intuitively giving this world gravity and an understanding of the forces necessary for this downward motion to occur.

In Dante's Inferno, Dante constructs nine levels of hell, that strangely can and have been applied to many lifestyles, such as academia.

So what does a poem concerned with perfect meter and vivid symbolism have to do with gravity, astronomy, and modern physics?
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Perhaps Dante himself can help us answer this question.

“Slowly, slowly it [Geryon] swam and took its course
wheeling, descending, as I could not tell
but for the breeze below, and on my cheek”
Canto XVII, Lines 115-117​

In this, Dante the narrator is explaining his descent between circles on the back of Geryon, a monster of fraud. “Wheeling” suggests a rotational descent on the back of the monster, and yet Dante the narrator can feel nothing but a breeze coming from below. Virgil explains lines earlier that Geryon should take his descent slowly, and keep the turns wide – keeping in mind Dante the narrator is now on his back. Dante the author has the unique sense of what can probably be described today as inertia and centrifugal force, two terms that were not coined until much later during Newton’s age. This argument was actually discussed with more detail in a Nature paper by Italian physicist, Leonardo Ricci, in 2005.

Moral of the story: if any of your friends in science argue that the humanities don’t matter, just tell them that the connection between the two brought forth a Nature paper for crying out loud!

​All joking aside, if Galileo found some use reading Dante's Inferno​, perhaps then today's scientists might as well. Or perhaps "Frankenstein", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", and perhaps even Shakespeare.