MATH OUT OF HELL Did Galileo invent modern physics by contemplating the intricate description of hell in Dante's Inferno? Jerusalem That's what Mount Holyoke College professor Mark Peterson argues. Here's how they connect.
DANTE’S VISION In Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” the poet narrates a journey through the underworld and heavens. The first book, “The Inferno,” describes hell as a conical abyss descending through the earth in nine concentric terraces.
Hell’s Gate
The Dark Forest Acheron River
1st Circle: Limbo
2nd Circle: The lustful Minos
3d Circle: Gluttons Cerberus 4th Circle: Hoarders 5th Circle: The wrathful River Styx Sinners receive eternal punishments in the City of Dis nine circles, each level representing a 6th Circle: Heretics gradual increase in wickedness. Minotaur Centaurs River Jerusalem 7th Circle: The violent Phlegethon
Harpies Wood of suicides Hell Great barrier and waterfall Detail
Geryon
8th Circle: Panderers, seducers flatterers, simoniacs Giants Mount Malebolge Purgatory
9th Circle: The giant pit terminates in a frozen lake, where Lucifer and Satan himself is held in bondage, trapped in the ice. traitors
Cocytus
GALILEO’S ANALYSIS Dante’s vivid descriptions inspired Renaissance mathematicians to theorize about the topography and geometry of hell. The most popular were two rival attempts by Antonio Manetti and Alessandro Vellutello. A young Galileo Galilei was asked to offer two lectures to the Florentine Academy, analyzing both descriptions.
MANETTI’S HELL VELLUTELLO’S HELL Manetti pictured the Vellutello described Inferno as a cone-shaped the pit as a series of region with its vertex at the truncated cones, where the center of the earth and its lower levels have parallel base on the surface, centered walls. It is much smaller than on Jerusalem. Manetti’s, reaching only 295 miles in depth. Lucifer (Vellutello)
Lucifer (Manetti)
Galileo favored Manetti’s hell as more plausible, reasoning that Manetti's Inferno could support itself against collapse. He argued that a small-scale model of Manetti's Inferno would support itself, like a dome over walls.
Galileo also examined the rival interpretations of the size of the creatures in The giant hell. Again, he dismissed the work of Antaeus Vellutello, who calculated Satan's stature at 3,000 braccia (5,853 feet), while Manetti Dante proposed a slightly more modest 2,000 braccia (3,902 feet) .
... AND COUNTERARGUMENT After he delivered the lectures, Galileo realized that both versions of hell were completely wrong — that the structures and beings described by both scholars would simply collapse under their own weight. He began to reexamine the problem, and in doing so developed the scaling laws and notion of material strength that became the basis for his final book, “Two New Sciences,” and part of the foundation of modern physics.
SOURCE: Mark A. Peterson, Mount Holyoke College