August 1, 2013 • 35 mins
The Science of Hell: Artists aren't alone in their fascination with Hell. Scientists two have long sought to breach the fiery gates and figure out just how it works. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie explore scientific ponderings over the Dante's "Inferno" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" from modern mathematicians, meteorologists and even Galileo. Robert sketched THIS MAP to help you out with the weather stuff.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to bow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Julie
Dante Decklas. That's your that's your your nickname today. Does
that make me Robert Virgil Lamb? Yes, I did that.
(00:26):
I think that And um, you know we're talking about
hell all Hell. Yep. We just did a whole episode
which I think would be like an hour about the
problem of Hell and about this our belief in Hell
and where it comes from, why it's problematic, and what
some of the what a couple of studies say about
how it may affect the way we go about our
daily lives. And so in this episode we're taking on
(00:48):
the science of Hell, where we're gonna look at some
scientific explorations about the structure of Hell, how it works,
how big it is. Um, A lot of this deals
with with doant but but but some of it gets
a little Miltonian as well. It does, And we're covering
this because it's sort of the ultimate magical thinking. We've
(01:08):
talked about magical thinking before, about ascribing these supernatural properties
to this construct. All right, and here we have an
extension of our mind. Uh, that's troubled by being physically
tethered to this body. This is how this is my
read of hell, by the way, So we're unable to
(01:29):
escape our physical selves or even our minds, and in
that there's there's a certain amount of pain to be processed,
physical pain and mental pain. And to me, this the
repository for all of this is Hell. It's the pit.
And we have put so much effort into Hell that
we've actually mapped it out, or rather those of us
(01:49):
who came before us, like Dante, have mapped it out,
just so that we can place that angst, in that
pain in very specific pockets. Yes, well, I think that's
a pretty good read on it. Yeah, and it's only
we've put a lot of effort into mapping it out,
creating depictions of it. And a lot of it stems
from the fact that if you're an artist, or if
you're a writer, you're a poet. Um the idea of
(02:10):
Hell is just a rich territory to play around in.
And if you're living in a time when say, the
Catholic Church holds way over pretty much everything, it's pretty
much it's one of the few acceptable ways to say,
draw a grotesque monster making love to a woman. You
know that that kind of stuff in the same way
that the Classics allowed the painters to to paint the
(02:32):
you know, the the nude human body. And if it's
incorporated into the right um, mythical or religious context, then
it's okay. So before we get into all these explorations,
I want to read just a quick bit from Chris
Wright's Measuring hell Um, which appeared in the Boston Globe
Um when he was talking about a publication that came
out dealing with Galileos calculations about Dante's Inferno, which will
(02:54):
discuss shortly, But but this particular quote I think sums
up a lot of why we're talking about it. He says,
debating the mechanics of the inferno might sound like intellectual horseplay,
the sixteenth century equivalent of M. I. T. Cafeteria debates
about the viability of star trek teleporters. But there was
more to the lectures than this. The insides Galileo gleaned
from analyzing Dante's measurements in fact anticipated a vital principle
(03:18):
of structural engineering by asserting that you cannot create a
giant Lucifer by supersizing the model of a man that
increasing an object's magnitude would create a whole new set
of structural and material imperatives. Galileo was paving the way
for the construction of everything from ocean liners to skyscrapers
to Macy's parade floats, um. And he goes down in
that article to even compare it to our our attempts
(03:40):
to understand many other things in the universe that that
are based in science, but we cannot see. You're trying
to understand how this universe works, and so you're applying
these thought experiments to aspects of it, which is pretty
cool because it's not just a repository for our fears.
It's a thought experiment, right, It's a way for us
to try to figure out physical universe. And a lot
(04:01):
of these these studies, they do have a lot in
common with some of these fun papers that you see.
There's one that came out recently dealing with the created
world of George R. Martin's wester Ros in the Game
of Thrones series, in the and in books, and and
they were trying to figure out, well, how would the
celestial mechanics of this planet work to provide it with
this weird seasonal cycle you see. Any we've we've seen
(04:24):
some other papers though there's a number of them that
dealt with the Harry Potter universe, where they're like, well,
how the genetics of muggles and vizards work? And it's
it's it's fascinating because it allows people to take their
science and sort of play around with it, put it
into this this box and and see what comes out
of it. I can't help but think that of gale
Leo's studies came out today that he would have been
awarded a Noble prize. Yes, but which is kind of great.
(04:46):
I talked about that Noble prize. Noble prize wonderful because
it's not merely in some cases a little mocking. But
but in most of the time, it's not about saying,
look at this idiot doing this study. It's like, this
is awesome. This person is is taking the science, applying
it to some some little corner of of our understanding
and uh and creating something useful out of it, or
you know, marginally useful, but still amazing. Alright, so let's
(05:09):
talk about the troublemaker who started this all. Dante and
his publication of a Divine Comedy in thirteen fourteen. Yes,
Dante a Leghari born twelve sixty five and Florence, Italy.
Died September fourteen one in Ravenna, Italy. And that's pretty
key because because of course Dante loved Florence and this
was his hometown and he eventually was not allowed to
(05:30):
return to it, and it was it was a bitter,
bitter fact for him, and and it factors into a
lot of his writings. But Uh, Dante was orphaned at
a young age, but he grew off with with well
off relatives in Florence, and he was well educated in
the classics and poetry, and he went on to be
a number of things in life. He was a businessman,
he was a soldier, he was a politician, he was
(05:51):
a philosophy professor, and of course, most importantly, he was
a writer. Uh and eventually, as I said, a writer
in exile from his beloved Florence. And of course he
was also extremely interested in the sciences um, which as
we've discussed before, um, when we're talking about consciousness and philosophy, UM,
to be interested in the sciences was to be interested
in philosophy. They often went hand in hand, and for instance,
(06:13):
he uh he read the works of of Aristotle, including
Aristotle's Meteorology. So what do you do if you are
exiled from your country and you have, uh, maybe some
very interesting ideas to explore, Well, you maybe map out
this terrain, not so much of your country, but of
your psyche. And this terrain would be in the form
(06:35):
of hell purgatory in heaven. And this is the divine comedy.
No comedy does not mean like funny, ha ha. Comedy
means that is going to end well, yes, which it
does in Paradise, Um. But the divine comedies. Inferno is
the part that we really want to talk about because
it's it's part of this epic poem, and the detail
(06:56):
is so florid, it's so imaginative, and it is so
very complete. It reminded me of Um the author. And
this is going to escape me. It's gonna dropping nuts.
So I'll follow up with this. But we talked about
this in one of our mapping episodes. He spent thirty
years creating this world language for he mapped it out
in great detail, the topography and in a way, Dante's
(07:18):
Inferno reminds me of this, because there's so much detail
packed into this that it really became for people the
landscape of how and it became such a popular text
because of this. Yeah, I mean you, you really can't
underscore this is the amazing level of world creation's going
on here, um, exceeding at least on part of not
exceeding the work that you see in uh in George R.
(07:41):
Martin's novels, or in Tolkien's novels, any kind of fantastic
world that we we think of when someone has created wholesale. Uh.
You know, Dante basically did this with with the Inferno.
He figured out exactly what the landscape would be, he
figured out who the characters occupying it were, and and
to your point, it is as much uh dante psyche
as place as it is uh an imagined version of Hell.
(08:04):
Because too, to read Inferno and and to read the
Divine Comedy as a whole, is to get to know
Dante's mind in and out. He doesn't hold back about
his feelings about about this person or that person, about
this subject or or this subject, And certainly along those lines,
the Divine Comedy is a crash course in in medieval
Italian culture, everything from the body stories and a little
(08:27):
bit of dirt on this guy to what the church
was doing. Who you know, what kind of heresies we
were we're taking place in the world, and when we're
still resonating, um, he's at times pursuing sort of petty
vendetta's with individuals and and other times he's championing individuals
who who who are are kind of scandalized, but that
(08:47):
he had a lot of empathy for their. Plenty of
characters there's there are one or two characters in particularly
the encounters in Hell that he kind of kicks them
on there down because they weren't they weren't friends with Dante.
But there are others that he's really sympathetic for. Right,
So you see some of the Florentine politicians who didn't
square with him end up in Hell. See a number
of popes are down there as well. Yeah, I mean
popes that they send as well, right in uh in Dante.
(09:09):
So let's walk really quickly through the landscape of this
so we can kind of get rooted in what is
important here when we talk about the science of Dante's Inferno,
all right, so you can find maps of this everywhere.
I encourage anyone listening to this who's not driving a
vehicle whatnot, to look up a map and I'll try
and include one on the blog posts that accompanies this.
(09:32):
But to imagine Dante's Hell, Dante's Inferno, imagine, first of all,
the round Earth, the Earth, that is the center of
the universe. Okay, and uh, then Lucifer falls from about
falls from Heaven like a rogue asteroid, and his impact
forms an enormous crater in the Earth, all right, craater
all and the crater goes all the way down to
(09:53):
the core of the Earth. And that's where Lucifer stops.
That's where he hits the bottom, okay, And that there's
this enormous crater up aroun on him. Now, then you
cover that crater with a vast vault, okay, So you
have this vaulted crater in the Earth. The Earth has
been pushed up for this entrance into Hell. Yeah, and
the and the some of the displaces Earth too, has
come out on the bottom the other side of the
(10:14):
planet in the form of the Mount of Purgatory. But
more on that in a little bit. So let's go
to the very bottom of this this crater again where
Lucifer fell. He's down there still his his crotch. Is
basically the center of the of the world, kid. Yeah,
this is the very bottom of the crater. It's also
the center of the Earth and kind of the bottom
of the universe too. And so Lucifer is frozen in
(10:37):
the Lake of Cassias. Okay. And also you'll find other
traitors frozen here as well. Uh. This is also the
Well of Giants where we find the Titans of Greek lore. Uh.
And it's also the ninth circle of Hell overall the
domain of treacherous fraud. Okay. So let's we're walking out
outward from the center and and emerging out of Hell. Okay,
(10:58):
so we're going up, We're going it up. Yeah, we're
doing the reverse of Dante on this. Okay. So when
we reached the edge of this domain is a high
cliff that rises up to a region of ascending terraces,
each composed of the pit and this is the Maliboca,
the eighth circle of Hell, and each bolgia, each each
terrace that's kind of a pit unto its own uh
and ringing all the way around. Okay. Uh, it's devote.
(11:21):
Each one is devoted to a different form of simple fraud,
such as there's one for panderas and seducers, there's one
for flatters, one for sorcerers and astrologers, one for hypocrites. Um,
it's worth exploring on your own, believe me. And then
there are these demons who work there as well, the Malibraca,
and they are in charge of tournamenting the individuals that
are imprisoned. There one thing you mentioned when you were
(11:44):
looking at this, you you were a little surprised to
find that that Lucifer at the very bottom of this
is just stuck and he's they're chewing on the three
great traders of all time, Mark Anthony, Brutus and Judas right,
because my satan is it is tethered into the version
of of Paradise Lost, where he's just he's ruling and
he's causing all sorts of mayhem. Yeah, he's a sympathetic character.
(12:06):
But here falling more in line with some of the
traditional accounts of hell previous, a lot of them would either,
because Dante was again wasn't the first person to describe
a trip to to even a Christian hell, but in
the past a lot of times they would just sort
of reference Lucifer or Satan from Afar. They wouldn't really
get into him as a character. And so here Lucifer
(12:26):
is very prominent, but he's not really a character. He's
more just a force. He's the he's the force that
formed this whole entire region. So he's really more asteroid
than character. He's kind of in suspended animation because he's
trapped in this ice. But what I do of is
the imagery of his, not his public region, but his
you know, his his hairy legs sticking up and then
(12:47):
traveling across it. But we'll get okay, so um, so
again we we we came out of that pit, out
of the casitas. Then we encountered the mal the mal Bojo,
with all these olds and all these little terraces where
people were pubnished. Okay, and if the limits of this
circle again we're moving out. We climb another steep cliff,
and now we're at the seventh circle, the violent, and
(13:09):
this is where the violence against other self or God.
It's a fiery plane. At first we crossed that, and
then we pass through the wood of the suicides. We
have these individuals whore grown into trees. Uh. And then
we pass over the boiling blood river of the Flagathon
and then there's another sheer cliff wall okay, and we
climb that wall. Then we're in the sixth circle. Okay,
(13:31):
this is the domain of the heretics, and beyond that
we find the walls of diss. This is this basically
a medieval fortress, walled fortress, and it goes again. It's
a circle, it's a ring wall. It's all the way around.
So you can almost think of this wall existing to
keep the horrors of inner hell from spilling out into
the outer hill. Uh. Not that it's actually doing that.
They just think of that in terms of a dividing point.
(13:52):
It's a fiery fortress. Um. As you said, it's kind
of where um it's staff only works right, and just
in the train it's it's situated on a plateau here.
So beyond the gates of Disk we pass into an
outer region of lighter sins. First there's the angry the
fifth circle, and then there's another cliff wall, and then
there's the fourth circle of average, and then there's another wall,
(14:14):
and then there's the third circle of Gluttony. Then there's
the second circle of lust, where the souls are whipped
about in the vortex of winds. And then there's another
cliff and we find the first circle of Limbo, where
the noble thinkers of old reside, people who are basically,
you know, they're they're too good for Hell, but they're
stuck there in the technicality. So so that's where they live,
on the outskirts of Hell basically. But then finally we
(14:35):
get to the we cross the River Acron and we
find the real very outskirts of Hell, and that's where
the lukewarm are, like, you know, the whole thing with Jesus,
the luke you know, the lukewarm a warm I spit
you out. You know you're not you know, you know
they're good, they're bad. You really don't have a place
in this And that's where these guys are. They're not
even bad enough to get into Hell, but they're not
good enough to be anywhere else. I guess you could
(14:56):
say ne'er do wells or loafers. Yeah, right. They didn't
really commit to need one thing, and so that's why
they haven't done any wonderful deeds in there in heaven
or anything terribly bad. And they're cast about into another level. Yeah,
it's like yeah, they're just like, yeah, we don't have
a place for you here. You can hang out outside
the gates, I guess. Yeah. So, as you guys can see,
this is a vast hell. We're talking about nine circles
(15:18):
featuring three rivers, one very cold lake. There's fire, there's ice. Uh,
there's a lot going on here, and just to get
into the detail of it would probably take us hours,
but we wanted to try to at least steep you
guys at the beginning here with the basic geography. Yeah,
with the vestival at the very top in the city
of disc in the middle of just fiery compound, and
(15:40):
then at the very bottom because site is the lake.
So there you go, basic geographic summary of Hell. It's
very important because this is the this is the world
that these scientific inquiries and papers are going to deal with.
So after the break we're gonna come back. We're gonna
look at how the roof of Hell works, We're gonna
look at how the weather in Hell works, and we're
going to look at another a couple of other scientific
(16:03):
concerns as well, regarding the inferno. All right, let's get
back to Galileo and in what might have been his
ignoble Prize for his studies about Hell and the measurements
(16:26):
concerning them. Yeah, the year was galile I was just
twenty four years old, hadn't really made a name for
himself yet, He's a medical school dropout. And then he
was invited to deliver to deliver a couple of lectures
on Dante's Divine Comedy um and particularly about the structure
of Hell, how hell might work from a a an
architectural physical standpoint. Now, just put this in the proper context.
(16:50):
By this time, Dante's Inferno or Divine Comedy would have
been extremely well known and was the authority on Hell.
People took a lot of stock in this is, taking
it really as a sort of gospel of what Hell
might look like. So for this upstart to come in
deliver this speech about how the mathematics don't really hold up. Yeah,
(17:15):
the very least, this was a highly regarded text. It
was this is like you know, I mean, it stands today,
it's still one of one of the greatest works of
Western civilization, and at the time it was was still
very well regarded. And so for anyone to come along
and start knocking at the science of it and saying, well,
you know, pointing out plot holes essentially. You know, people,
(17:35):
you can get a little up in arms over there
and to be weaving science with a little story here. Yeah. Now,
in particular, the interesting thing he did um in this
talk was that he dealt with a couple of existing theories.
He was not the first person to do a little
science thinking about the structure of the inferno. Uh So
(17:55):
what he did is he attacked one particular architectural model
of the inferno for an inferno, one proposed by Alexandro
Valtulio of of Luca and while while he supported a
second model that was suggested by the Florentine architect Antonio Manetti. Now,
of course Florence again the birthplace of Dante. Uh it's
(18:17):
important to keep in mind, well, it's kind of like
the Bloods and the Cripts here too, because Luca is
kind of like Bloods and and Florence is the Cripts
and they have a long standing rivalry. Yeah, and Florence
had just suffered a humiliating defeat by Luca in four
and so this is on everybody's mind. So what does
Galileo come It comes in. He comes in and says,
Belatulo's his argument, his structure for the inferno that would
just collapse. The guy's got it right, is our boy
(18:39):
from Florence. And so he hands uh, he hands Manetti
the victory and uh and then leaves. Basically, now, after
the fact, he probably realized that both models would collapse
because that is a huge vault that would have to
be constructed to cover this enormous crater in the earth. Yeah,
but he did. He took all the measurements that he
could from the town X, like the blasted canyons and
(19:02):
the valleys and the rivers, and he did find out
that they did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. As
you say, he did sort of discredit one of um,
one of them, But then later on he just quit
talking about that whole thing. Yeah, and he knew that
both of them were wrong, and a lot of Galileo
scholars they kind of just they just kind of cast
this this aside. It's just being sort of an early,
(19:22):
kind of fun but not really important aspect of Galileo's life,
And really it is more of a footnote to the
great things that he would do later on. Yeah, But
as Chris Wright had said, you know, it's his measurements
of Hell inadvertently contributed to the foundation of theoretical physics. Exactly.
All right, let's get out of the weather in Hell.
And I believe they're used. My wife was telling me
they used to be a website. We could go and
(19:43):
you could get the weather in Hell, like whatever the
weather is going to be, and it's gonna be like
like a flash floods of ran said, yogurt and stuff.
But you know, even better would be David Lynch reading it. Yes,
there's a website where you can also get the weather.
It's the weather than the normal world, right right by
David Lynch. So Dante was of course possessed of an
amazing curiosity, and and as I mentioned earlier, he'd already
(20:05):
certainly read Aristotle's work on meteorology. He found rich poetic
use of not only the weather, because certainly everyone loves
to throw a little weather into a poem or whatnot,
but he also understood the mechanics of weather, and you
like to play with that as well. So meteorological themes
pop up throughout his work in some of his earlier poems,
and certainly uh with in the Divine Comedy. He lacked
our modern understanding of meteorology. But but the relationship between
(20:28):
water and earth, all of it factors into some of
his earliest poems, and it's certainly a part of the Inferno.
So yeah, he would have taken this knowledge and then
applied it to this mapping of Hell, in this descent
into Hell, and in the article a great article, the
Weather of Hell by Randy Servenni, actually take a look
(20:49):
at specifically his descriptions of the weather and how it
really weirdly lines up what would would really happen if
you have Hell in those weather systems. Again, we talked
about sort of the basic landmarks here, but let me
just describe them once more. You have the Vestia Puble,
which is at the very top. You have the city
(21:09):
of Discs in the middle, and then you have Casitas,
the frozen lake at the very Okay, and I want
to point this out again because Casita is the frozen
lake in the city of dis and all of its fireingness.
These are creating two major circulation cells in Hell, which
the author points out is um creating various winds and
(21:30):
so on and so forth. That would really line up
with what would happen. So, uh, with that in mind,
let's talk about circulation cells. Because we're not going to
go into weather in earnest. But hey, in fact, I'm
just gonna briefly run through some run through some stuff
from our article how weather works that I wrote. Okay,
so two key properties that govern the atmosphere air pressure
(21:51):
dictated by gravity, and air temperature dictated by solar and
terrestrial radiation. But all these gases make up the make
up the atmosphere, and they don't just stay in one place.
As he certainly observed, air moves. Vertical air currents result
from changes in temperature and pressure. When air heats up,
its molecules move around more rapidly, pushing each other farther apart.
The air becomes less dense and rises up through the
(22:13):
troposphere towards thinner air. In doing so, however, it moves
into colder regions, it begins to cool, and it eventually
cools down to a denser state and sinks back down. Okay,
So when the air in one area heats up faster
than the air in an enjoining area, the pressure differential
generates wind. For example, Uh, look, you can just look
at a modern city. All that concrete and steel observed
(22:33):
absorbs a much more heat than the surrounding countryside. As such,
the air in that city grows hotter during the day,
becomes less dense, and rises in a vertical movement known
as an updraft. Meanwhile, the cooler air in the countryside
is under far more pressure and begins to flow into
the city in the form of surface wind to fill
the low pressure area. Once it enters the hot city, however,
(22:53):
it heats up and begins to rise in an updraft.
The air above it cools, but it can't settle back
into place due to all the rise hot air underneath it. Instead,
the cooling air simply pushes out to the side in
the form of an upper air wind heading back to
the countryside, and this wind cycle continues in a nightfall
sends everything into reverse as the city cools faster than
the surrounding areas. So to put this into the form
(23:15):
of a simplified version of the Earth, imagine an Earth
that doesn't rotate and doesn't experience night In this example,
let's also pretend that the sun heats the areas around
the equator the most, and the poles the least. This
is a lot like the city example, except the entire
equatorial belt would be the city in the scenario, and
the land and sea cooling towards the poles would be
(23:35):
the countryside that This would result in two massive bowl
shaped convection cells, one for each hemisphere. Surface flows of
cool air would sweep toward the equator, heating up along
the way. Upon arrival, this air would ascend in an updraft,
and then it would sweep back toward the poles in
a cooling upper air wind. So there's a simplified version
of how air moves in the real world. It's all
(23:56):
about about pressure differentials and air swooping into one area,
rising and swooping back across over the top. Okay, yeah,
So in a nutshell, you've got the sun which is
heating the molecules. They rise because they they've got high
pressure now, and then you've got low pressure more condensed
air rushing into displace. That we're talking about displaced air,
and that's how winds are creating. That's how air moves about,
(24:17):
and it creates this circular movement of air. Right, So
you have a circulation cell, so you have certain areas
that become this this closed loop. And when you look
at Dante's inferno, you have to circulation cells. And the
first one starts, of course, at the very beginning, and
it ends at the city of This. Okay, because you
have again all of this weather happening, this heat from
(24:41):
the city of This, which is informing things at say,
the first circle of Hell. Yeah, and pluses of boiling
river next to it, so you have the hat heading
to the possible heat as well. Um. So yeah, hot
air rises from the sixth circle just beyond the walls
of dis and then it rolls back towards the gates
of Hell at a high altitude and then sinks back
down at the first circle of Hell, and it sweeps
across the surface till it blows through diss and back
(25:03):
up the sixth circle again. So that's the the upper
circulation cell as laid out by Serviny. But then he
also says that are Dante's text lays out this lower
circulation cell as well. Yeah. Now that second loop stretches
from the rising air of the the fiery city of
discs as it redistributes air towards the central pit of Hell,
(25:24):
and it sinks into the bone freezing cold um of
the Cosatukcitis excuse me lake, and then it makes its
way back over Malbolga, which is the terraced area, and
then back up to the city of Diss. So that's
your second circulation cell. Yes now, and I'm gonna I'll
sketch out a little version of what this looks like
(25:45):
and include this on the website so you can you
can look at it. It's it's really incredible because Serveni
makes a really strong case that you if you look
at the meteorological details that are included in Inferno, and
there are a lot of them, because because Dante's clearly
a weather bug, and it included all these details along
with all these other world building details of what Inferno
consisted of. But you you read the details, you read
(26:05):
about the movements of air and the descriptions of what
the wind is doing and what the temperature is doing.
It clearly spells out a working um to sell air
circulation system. It does, and we can actually run through
every single point or every single circle and help, but
we won't do that. But I did want to talk
about a couple of them because it's really interesting. Uh.
(26:26):
Servening talks about in the vegetable in the first circle.
That these are dominated by high pressure with pretty calm winds.
But when Virgil and Dante enter the second circle, them
with a stormy blast of hell and um. This is
where Servenny says the strong pressure gradient causes winds as
a function of the high and low pressure systems. And
this is kind of a nice touch because when you
(26:48):
go into the second circle, it's extremely windy, and this
is where the lustful are punished and the winds are
whipping around them, the winds of their desires. And then
of course you go in the third circle and there's
lots of showers and uh, that's that's where it's really
heavy and cold wind and it's really stank there by
the way. Um. And then the third circle of course
(27:09):
has glotony and there's intense storms. Um. And again this
is a result of the strong surface heat blowing back
from the city of Discs and the low pressure system
that exists in the valley that descends before Dante in Virgil.
So again, as you say, Dante had a really good
idea of how weather systems were working, a good enough
idea to try to imagine it in this place and
(27:31):
set the territory and the geography to the weather conditions.
It's kind of beautiful. It is, I mean, it's it's
amazing to think of because it's I mean, you'd be
hard pressed to find an earlier, more fully formed world
in in in literature and in someone's mind, as as
as the Inferno and Them and Purgatory in Paradise as well.
(27:55):
But but certainly Infernos the best of the three because
it's it's it's where you have all these rich, gross details.
That's where you have demons playing trumpets with their butts. Um.
You don't encounter much of that though, the higher up
you get, so there's less because because Dante's Inferno is
rather humorous at times, there is some good schatology and yeah, yeah,
and of course because there's so much treacherous detail that
(28:17):
he had to put some sort of comedy elements in
there just as a little break. Now, some people would
take issue with gravity, yes, because in Dante's Inferno, when
Dante in Virgil are descending, they're experiencing the same kind
of gravity that they would on the surface of Earth.
So if they're crossing a bridge or you know, if
(28:40):
they're dodging arrows, or you know, some sort of missile
as with hell Um. Then that's all being acted on
as if everything were normal. But things, of course, as
we know, would not be normal. If you plunged down
into Earth. Well now, I've read arguments though that that
cross gravity is is due to mass, and so you
(29:00):
have the gravity on the Earth is determined by the
amount of mass involved. I've read arguments though that that
that you descended deeper, it would be about the mass
around you, and that would that would determine how much
up a gravitational pull was beneath your feet. It would
slow you down because there's more there's more mass above
you and around you, so your descent would be slower.
(29:20):
In fact, we have a really good article by Nicholas
Gurbas called what would happen if I drolled the tunnel
through the center of the Earth and jumped into it?
Now that's a little bit different. We're talking about a
free fall jump as opposed to just descending in but
the idea is essentially the same. It is, but in
gurbs article he does say that at the core as
you as you get to the core the planet's center,
(29:41):
your acceleration uh due to gravity is zero, and Earth's
maths around you, and then gravity cancels out and you
are weightless. And a curious thing happens along these lines.
In Dante's Inferro, at the very end, after they've worked
their way to the very bottom, the like Accitis, they
see the massive Lucifer there with his three faces, ting
(30:02):
on the three great traders of Western civilization. Uh. They
go up and the way out is down, and they
start climbing down the furry shanks of Lucifer. Uh. And
remember his clatches the center of of of the planet
in this model. So what happens when they reach the
very center, Well, there is up as down and down
(30:23):
as up, just as if you were in space, right.
And this is called the antipodes. Yeah, this is what
NASA has to say about it. This is from Angela
Richard about the center of the Earth, not about Lucifer's hinder. Uh.
She says, if you could be at the exact center,
the forces that each bit of Earth matter exerted on
you would counsel out up, canceling down, east, canceling west, etcetera.
(30:45):
This only occurs for a single point, though, and you
would still feel a gravitational force on the rest of
your body. So there would be this point that where
things would switch, and that's what happens to Virgil and Dunte. Yeah,
and Servendice says that Dante may have lifted this concept
from first century writer Plutarch, who said, if a man
should so coalesce with the earth that its center is
(31:06):
at his navel, the same person at the same time
has his head up and his feet up too. So yeah,
this idea that the portal kind of shifts. And this
is actually taken from Dante's Inferno. It says, and when
we had come to where the huge thigh bone rides
in its socket, that the haunts swell my gude with
labor and great exertion, turned head to where his feet
(31:29):
had been, and fell to hoisten himself up in the air,
so that I thought us mounting back to Hell. In
other words, this is he's completely discombobled and trying to
figure out where he is and he sees this different
view of Satan's hairy leg. Yeah. Now, some of this
also comes from Professor Andrew J. Simolson's article The Gravity
(31:53):
of Hell the Gravity of Hades rather and he gets
into a little Miltonian physics as well um Milton's A
Paradise Lost. Of course, we mentioned this uh briefly earlier
in this podcaster and the other one about Hell. Uh.
In Milton's Paradise Lost, Lucifer's and more relatable character, sympathetic character,
and the dark Angel. He's the dark Angel and we
get to learn about his fall. So somos and looks
(32:15):
at this, and he's realized that naturally, Lucifer's fall from
Heaven to Hell is the perfect measuring stick to figure
out what is the distance between Heaven and Hell. So
in this article he looks at at Lucifer's descent from
from Heaven to Hell and says, well, this would be
a great way of measuring the distance between Heaven and
Hell if we could figure out if we could apply
some equations to this. And that's what he does in
(32:37):
this paper. He applies a lot of mathematical computation to
what he can glean from the test from the text.
Uh and basically it says uh him Satan the almighty
power hurled headlong, flaming from the eternal sky with hideous
ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition and uh and
apparently it takes him about nine days to reach between
(33:01):
Heaven and Hell. So he starts breaking that down. Uh
you know, how how how great a distance would that be?
And then you also have to wonder, Okay, if this
occurred not long after the Big Bang, then maybe certain
laws are not applying. Is he bound by the speed
of light, is he bound by the uh, by the
speed of a physical object? Or is he surpassing it?
So it could take you know, forty million years, he figures,
(33:23):
if he was to reach the center of the Milky Way,
but it could take, you know, take a much shorter
amount of time if he's going faster than light. So
it's it's some some wonderful thought experimentation it's going on
in that article. Yeah, it's again, it's a wonderful Hell
is a wonderful idea to play with to explore our universe.
(33:44):
All right, Well, there you go. Hopefully we did not
lose you too much in the descriptions of hell and
the descriptions of weather in the real world. But uh,
but but again, look at some of these charts that
we're talking about. Look on the website, and I think
that should help it. I'll make a little more sense.
It's again it's very much in keeping with some of
these papers that are out there about about how the
(34:05):
how DNA works, how genetics work, and Harry Potter how
the solar system works in Game of Thrones. Uh, but
then it also hints it something greater. This the idea
that the science is this this way that we can
we can feel the unknown, we can reach out and
touch things that we haven't yet explored yet and and
try to figure out what is the black hole? Uh,
you know, what is dark matter. But then we can
(34:26):
also reach them into the imagined worlds and try and
figure out the limits of those worlds as well. Yeah,
I mean, what are the coordinates of Satan's touch exactly?
Science is still the science is still still out on that,
by the works. So in the meantime, if you would
like to get in touch with us, you can find
us in the usual ways. Again, that website is Stuff
to Abow your Mind dot com. You can also find
(34:48):
us on social media. We're on Twitter as Blow the Mind.
We're on Facebook and tumbler as Stuff to Blow your Mind.
On YouTube we are Mind Stuff Show and you can
always drop us a line at Blow the Mind at
Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to bow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Julie
Dante Decklas. That's your that's your your nickname today. Does
that make me Robert Virgil Lamb? Yes, I did that.
(00:26):
I think that And um, you know we're talking about
hell all Hell. Yep. We just did a whole episode
which I think would be like an hour about the
problem of Hell and about this our belief in Hell
and where it comes from, why it's problematic, and what
some of the what a couple of studies say about
how it may affect the way we go about our
daily lives. And so in this episode we're taking on
(00:48):
the science of Hell, where we're gonna look at some
scientific explorations about the structure of Hell, how it works,
how big it is. Um, A lot of this deals
with with doant but but but some of it gets
a little Miltonian as well. It does, And we're covering
this because it's sort of the ultimate magical thinking. We've
(01:08):
talked about magical thinking before, about ascribing these supernatural properties
to this construct. All right, and here we have an
extension of our mind. Uh, that's troubled by being physically
tethered to this body. This is how this is my
read of hell, by the way, So we're unable to
(01:29):
escape our physical selves or even our minds, and in
that there's there's a certain amount of pain to be processed,
physical pain and mental pain. And to me, this the
repository for all of this is Hell. It's the pit.
And we have put so much effort into Hell that
we've actually mapped it out, or rather those of us
(01:49):
who came before us, like Dante, have mapped it out,
just so that we can place that angst, in that
pain in very specific pockets. Yes, well, I think that's
a pretty good read on it. Yeah, and it's only
we've put a lot of effort into mapping it out,
creating depictions of it. And a lot of it stems
from the fact that if you're an artist, or if
you're a writer, you're a poet. Um the idea of
(02:10):
Hell is just a rich territory to play around in.
And if you're living in a time when say, the
Catholic Church holds way over pretty much everything, it's pretty
much it's one of the few acceptable ways to say,
draw a grotesque monster making love to a woman. You
know that that kind of stuff in the same way
that the Classics allowed the painters to to paint the
(02:32):
you know, the the nude human body. And if it's
incorporated into the right um, mythical or religious context, then
it's okay. So before we get into all these explorations,
I want to read just a quick bit from Chris
Wright's Measuring hell Um, which appeared in the Boston Globe
Um when he was talking about a publication that came
out dealing with Galileos calculations about Dante's Inferno, which will
(02:54):
discuss shortly, But but this particular quote I think sums
up a lot of why we're talking about it. He says,
debating the mechanics of the inferno might sound like intellectual horseplay,
the sixteenth century equivalent of M. I. T. Cafeteria debates
about the viability of star trek teleporters. But there was
more to the lectures than this. The insides Galileo gleaned
from analyzing Dante's measurements in fact anticipated a vital principle
(03:18):
of structural engineering by asserting that you cannot create a
giant Lucifer by supersizing the model of a man that
increasing an object's magnitude would create a whole new set
of structural and material imperatives. Galileo was paving the way
for the construction of everything from ocean liners to skyscrapers
to Macy's parade floats, um. And he goes down in
that article to even compare it to our our attempts
(03:40):
to understand many other things in the universe that that
are based in science, but we cannot see. You're trying
to understand how this universe works, and so you're applying
these thought experiments to aspects of it, which is pretty
cool because it's not just a repository for our fears.
It's a thought experiment, right, It's a way for us
to try to figure out physical universe. And a lot
(04:01):
of these these studies, they do have a lot in
common with some of these fun papers that you see.
There's one that came out recently dealing with the created
world of George R. Martin's wester Ros in the Game
of Thrones series, in the and in books, and and
they were trying to figure out, well, how would the
celestial mechanics of this planet work to provide it with
this weird seasonal cycle you see. Any we've we've seen
(04:24):
some other papers though there's a number of them that
dealt with the Harry Potter universe, where they're like, well,
how the genetics of muggles and vizards work? And it's
it's it's fascinating because it allows people to take their
science and sort of play around with it, put it
into this this box and and see what comes out
of it. I can't help but think that of gale
Leo's studies came out today that he would have been
awarded a Noble prize. Yes, but which is kind of great.
(04:46):
I talked about that Noble prize. Noble prize wonderful because
it's not merely in some cases a little mocking. But
but in most of the time, it's not about saying,
look at this idiot doing this study. It's like, this
is awesome. This person is is taking the science, applying
it to some some little corner of of our understanding
and uh and creating something useful out of it, or
you know, marginally useful, but still amazing. Alright, so let's
(05:09):
talk about the troublemaker who started this all. Dante and
his publication of a Divine Comedy in thirteen fourteen. Yes,
Dante a Leghari born twelve sixty five and Florence, Italy.
Died September fourteen one in Ravenna, Italy. And that's pretty
key because because of course Dante loved Florence and this
was his hometown and he eventually was not allowed to
(05:30):
return to it, and it was it was a bitter,
bitter fact for him, and and it factors into a
lot of his writings. But Uh, Dante was orphaned at
a young age, but he grew off with with well
off relatives in Florence, and he was well educated in
the classics and poetry, and he went on to be
a number of things in life. He was a businessman,
he was a soldier, he was a politician, he was
(05:51):
a philosophy professor, and of course, most importantly, he was
a writer. Uh and eventually, as I said, a writer
in exile from his beloved Florence. And of course he
was also extremely interested in the sciences um, which as
we've discussed before, um, when we're talking about consciousness and philosophy, UM,
to be interested in the sciences was to be interested
in philosophy. They often went hand in hand, and for instance,
(06:13):
he uh he read the works of of Aristotle, including
Aristotle's Meteorology. So what do you do if you are
exiled from your country and you have, uh, maybe some
very interesting ideas to explore, Well, you maybe map out
this terrain, not so much of your country, but of
your psyche. And this terrain would be in the form
(06:35):
of hell purgatory in heaven. And this is the divine comedy.
No comedy does not mean like funny, ha ha. Comedy
means that is going to end well, yes, which it
does in Paradise, Um. But the divine comedies. Inferno is
the part that we really want to talk about because
it's it's part of this epic poem, and the detail
(06:56):
is so florid, it's so imaginative, and it is so
very complete. It reminded me of Um the author. And
this is going to escape me. It's gonna dropping nuts.
So I'll follow up with this. But we talked about
this in one of our mapping episodes. He spent thirty
years creating this world language for he mapped it out
in great detail, the topography and in a way, Dante's
(07:18):
Inferno reminds me of this, because there's so much detail
packed into this that it really became for people the
landscape of how and it became such a popular text
because of this. Yeah, I mean you, you really can't
underscore this is the amazing level of world creation's going
on here, um, exceeding at least on part of not
exceeding the work that you see in uh in George R.
(07:41):
Martin's novels, or in Tolkien's novels, any kind of fantastic
world that we we think of when someone has created wholesale. Uh.
You know, Dante basically did this with with the Inferno.
He figured out exactly what the landscape would be, he
figured out who the characters occupying it were, and and
to your point, it is as much uh dante psyche
as place as it is uh an imagined version of Hell.
(08:04):
Because too, to read Inferno and and to read the
Divine Comedy as a whole, is to get to know
Dante's mind in and out. He doesn't hold back about
his feelings about about this person or that person, about
this subject or or this subject, And certainly along those lines,
the Divine Comedy is a crash course in in medieval
Italian culture, everything from the body stories and a little
(08:27):
bit of dirt on this guy to what the church
was doing. Who you know, what kind of heresies we
were we're taking place in the world, and when we're
still resonating, um, he's at times pursuing sort of petty
vendetta's with individuals and and other times he's championing individuals
who who who are are kind of scandalized, but that
(08:47):
he had a lot of empathy for their. Plenty of
characters there's there are one or two characters in particularly
the encounters in Hell that he kind of kicks them
on there down because they weren't they weren't friends with Dante.
But there are others that he's really sympathetic for. Right,
So you see some of the Florentine politicians who didn't
square with him end up in Hell. See a number
of popes are down there as well. Yeah, I mean
popes that they send as well, right in uh in Dante.
(09:09):
So let's walk really quickly through the landscape of this
so we can kind of get rooted in what is
important here when we talk about the science of Dante's Inferno,
all right, so you can find maps of this everywhere.
I encourage anyone listening to this who's not driving a
vehicle whatnot, to look up a map and I'll try
and include one on the blog posts that accompanies this.
(09:32):
But to imagine Dante's Hell, Dante's Inferno, imagine, first of all,
the round Earth, the Earth, that is the center of
the universe. Okay, and uh, then Lucifer falls from about
falls from Heaven like a rogue asteroid, and his impact
forms an enormous crater in the Earth, all right, craater
all and the crater goes all the way down to
(09:53):
the core of the Earth. And that's where Lucifer stops.
That's where he hits the bottom, okay, And that there's
this enormous crater up aroun on him. Now, then you
cover that crater with a vast vault, okay, So you
have this vaulted crater in the Earth. The Earth has
been pushed up for this entrance into Hell. Yeah, and
the and the some of the displaces Earth too, has
come out on the bottom the other side of the
(10:14):
planet in the form of the Mount of Purgatory. But
more on that in a little bit. So let's go
to the very bottom of this this crater again where
Lucifer fell. He's down there still his his crotch. Is
basically the center of the of the world, kid. Yeah,
this is the very bottom of the crater. It's also
the center of the Earth and kind of the bottom
of the universe too. And so Lucifer is frozen in
(10:37):
the Lake of Cassias. Okay. And also you'll find other
traitors frozen here as well. Uh. This is also the
Well of Giants where we find the Titans of Greek lore. Uh.
And it's also the ninth circle of Hell overall the
domain of treacherous fraud. Okay. So let's we're walking out
outward from the center and and emerging out of Hell. Okay,
(10:58):
so we're going up, We're going it up. Yeah, we're
doing the reverse of Dante on this. Okay. So when
we reached the edge of this domain is a high
cliff that rises up to a region of ascending terraces,
each composed of the pit and this is the Maliboca,
the eighth circle of Hell, and each bolgia, each each
terrace that's kind of a pit unto its own uh
and ringing all the way around. Okay. Uh, it's devote.
(11:21):
Each one is devoted to a different form of simple fraud,
such as there's one for panderas and seducers, there's one
for flatters, one for sorcerers and astrologers, one for hypocrites. Um,
it's worth exploring on your own, believe me. And then
there are these demons who work there as well, the Malibraca,
and they are in charge of tournamenting the individuals that
are imprisoned. There one thing you mentioned when you were
(11:44):
looking at this, you you were a little surprised to
find that that Lucifer at the very bottom of this
is just stuck and he's they're chewing on the three
great traders of all time, Mark Anthony, Brutus and Judas right,
because my satan is it is tethered into the version
of of Paradise Lost, where he's just he's ruling and
he's causing all sorts of mayhem. Yeah, he's a sympathetic character.
(12:06):
But here falling more in line with some of the
traditional accounts of hell previous, a lot of them would either,
because Dante was again wasn't the first person to describe
a trip to to even a Christian hell, but in
the past a lot of times they would just sort
of reference Lucifer or Satan from Afar. They wouldn't really
get into him as a character. And so here Lucifer
(12:26):
is very prominent, but he's not really a character. He's
more just a force. He's the he's the force that
formed this whole entire region. So he's really more asteroid
than character. He's kind of in suspended animation because he's
trapped in this ice. But what I do of is
the imagery of his, not his public region, but his
you know, his his hairy legs sticking up and then
(12:47):
traveling across it. But we'll get okay, so um, so
again we we we came out of that pit, out
of the casitas. Then we encountered the mal the mal Bojo,
with all these olds and all these little terraces where
people were pubnished. Okay, and if the limits of this
circle again we're moving out. We climb another steep cliff,
and now we're at the seventh circle, the violent, and
(13:09):
this is where the violence against other self or God.
It's a fiery plane. At first we crossed that, and
then we pass through the wood of the suicides. We
have these individuals whore grown into trees. Uh. And then
we pass over the boiling blood river of the Flagathon
and then there's another sheer cliff wall okay, and we
climb that wall. Then we're in the sixth circle. Okay,
(13:31):
this is the domain of the heretics, and beyond that
we find the walls of diss. This is this basically
a medieval fortress, walled fortress, and it goes again. It's
a circle, it's a ring wall. It's all the way around.
So you can almost think of this wall existing to
keep the horrors of inner hell from spilling out into
the outer hill. Uh. Not that it's actually doing that.
They just think of that in terms of a dividing point.
(13:52):
It's a fiery fortress. Um. As you said, it's kind
of where um it's staff only works right, and just
in the train it's it's situated on a plateau here.
So beyond the gates of Disk we pass into an
outer region of lighter sins. First there's the angry the
fifth circle, and then there's another cliff wall, and then
there's the fourth circle of average, and then there's another wall,
(14:14):
and then there's the third circle of Gluttony. Then there's
the second circle of lust, where the souls are whipped
about in the vortex of winds. And then there's another
cliff and we find the first circle of Limbo, where
the noble thinkers of old reside, people who are basically,
you know, they're they're too good for Hell, but they're
stuck there in the technicality. So so that's where they live,
on the outskirts of Hell basically. But then finally we
(14:35):
get to the we cross the River Acron and we
find the real very outskirts of Hell, and that's where
the lukewarm are, like, you know, the whole thing with Jesus,
the luke you know, the lukewarm a warm I spit
you out. You know you're not you know, you know
they're good, they're bad. You really don't have a place
in this And that's where these guys are. They're not
even bad enough to get into Hell, but they're not
good enough to be anywhere else. I guess you could
(14:56):
say ne'er do wells or loafers. Yeah, right. They didn't
really commit to need one thing, and so that's why
they haven't done any wonderful deeds in there in heaven
or anything terribly bad. And they're cast about into another level. Yeah,
it's like yeah, they're just like, yeah, we don't have
a place for you here. You can hang out outside
the gates, I guess. Yeah. So, as you guys can see,
this is a vast hell. We're talking about nine circles
(15:18):
featuring three rivers, one very cold lake. There's fire, there's ice. Uh,
there's a lot going on here, and just to get
into the detail of it would probably take us hours,
but we wanted to try to at least steep you
guys at the beginning here with the basic geography. Yeah,
with the vestival at the very top in the city
of disc in the middle of just fiery compound, and
(15:40):
then at the very bottom because site is the lake.
So there you go, basic geographic summary of Hell. It's
very important because this is the this is the world
that these scientific inquiries and papers are going to deal with.
So after the break we're gonna come back. We're gonna
look at how the roof of Hell works, We're gonna
look at how the weather in Hell works, and we're
going to look at another a couple of other scientific
(16:03):
concerns as well, regarding the inferno. All right, let's get
back to Galileo and in what might have been his
ignoble Prize for his studies about Hell and the measurements
(16:26):
concerning them. Yeah, the year was galile I was just
twenty four years old, hadn't really made a name for
himself yet, He's a medical school dropout. And then he
was invited to deliver to deliver a couple of lectures
on Dante's Divine Comedy um and particularly about the structure
of Hell, how hell might work from a a an
architectural physical standpoint. Now, just put this in the proper context.
(16:50):
By this time, Dante's Inferno or Divine Comedy would have
been extremely well known and was the authority on Hell.
People took a lot of stock in this is, taking
it really as a sort of gospel of what Hell
might look like. So for this upstart to come in
deliver this speech about how the mathematics don't really hold up. Yeah,
(17:15):
the very least, this was a highly regarded text. It
was this is like you know, I mean, it stands today,
it's still one of one of the greatest works of
Western civilization, and at the time it was was still
very well regarded. And so for anyone to come along
and start knocking at the science of it and saying, well,
you know, pointing out plot holes essentially. You know, people,
(17:35):
you can get a little up in arms over there
and to be weaving science with a little story here. Yeah. Now,
in particular, the interesting thing he did um in this
talk was that he dealt with a couple of existing theories.
He was not the first person to do a little
science thinking about the structure of the inferno. Uh So
(17:55):
what he did is he attacked one particular architectural model
of the inferno for an inferno, one proposed by Alexandro
Valtulio of of Luca and while while he supported a
second model that was suggested by the Florentine architect Antonio Manetti. Now,
of course Florence again the birthplace of Dante. Uh it's
(18:17):
important to keep in mind, well, it's kind of like
the Bloods and the Cripts here too, because Luca is
kind of like Bloods and and Florence is the Cripts
and they have a long standing rivalry. Yeah, and Florence
had just suffered a humiliating defeat by Luca in four
and so this is on everybody's mind. So what does
Galileo come It comes in. He comes in and says,
Belatulo's his argument, his structure for the inferno that would
just collapse. The guy's got it right, is our boy
(18:39):
from Florence. And so he hands uh, he hands Manetti
the victory and uh and then leaves. Basically, now, after
the fact, he probably realized that both models would collapse
because that is a huge vault that would have to
be constructed to cover this enormous crater in the earth. Yeah,
but he did. He took all the measurements that he
could from the town X, like the blasted canyons and
(19:02):
the valleys and the rivers, and he did find out
that they did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. As
you say, he did sort of discredit one of um,
one of them, But then later on he just quit
talking about that whole thing. Yeah, and he knew that
both of them were wrong, and a lot of Galileo
scholars they kind of just they just kind of cast
this this aside. It's just being sort of an early,
(19:22):
kind of fun but not really important aspect of Galileo's life,
And really it is more of a footnote to the
great things that he would do later on. Yeah, But
as Chris Wright had said, you know, it's his measurements
of Hell inadvertently contributed to the foundation of theoretical physics. Exactly.
All right, let's get out of the weather in Hell.
And I believe they're used. My wife was telling me
they used to be a website. We could go and
(19:43):
you could get the weather in Hell, like whatever the
weather is going to be, and it's gonna be like
like a flash floods of ran said, yogurt and stuff.
But you know, even better would be David Lynch reading it. Yes,
there's a website where you can also get the weather.
It's the weather than the normal world, right right by
David Lynch. So Dante was of course possessed of an
amazing curiosity, and and as I mentioned earlier, he'd already
(20:05):
certainly read Aristotle's work on meteorology. He found rich poetic
use of not only the weather, because certainly everyone loves
to throw a little weather into a poem or whatnot,
but he also understood the mechanics of weather, and you
like to play with that as well. So meteorological themes
pop up throughout his work in some of his earlier poems,
and certainly uh with in the Divine Comedy. He lacked
our modern understanding of meteorology. But but the relationship between
(20:28):
water and earth, all of it factors into some of
his earliest poems, and it's certainly a part of the Inferno.
So yeah, he would have taken this knowledge and then
applied it to this mapping of Hell, in this descent
into Hell, and in the article a great article, the
Weather of Hell by Randy Servenni, actually take a look
(20:49):
at specifically his descriptions of the weather and how it
really weirdly lines up what would would really happen if
you have Hell in those weather systems. Again, we talked
about sort of the basic landmarks here, but let me
just describe them once more. You have the Vestia Puble,
which is at the very top. You have the city
(21:09):
of Discs in the middle, and then you have Casitas,
the frozen lake at the very Okay, and I want
to point this out again because Casita is the frozen
lake in the city of dis and all of its fireingness.
These are creating two major circulation cells in Hell, which
the author points out is um creating various winds and
(21:30):
so on and so forth. That would really line up
with what would happen. So, uh, with that in mind,
let's talk about circulation cells. Because we're not going to
go into weather in earnest. But hey, in fact, I'm
just gonna briefly run through some run through some stuff
from our article how weather works that I wrote. Okay,
so two key properties that govern the atmosphere air pressure
(21:51):
dictated by gravity, and air temperature dictated by solar and
terrestrial radiation. But all these gases make up the make
up the atmosphere, and they don't just stay in one place.
As he certainly observed, air moves. Vertical air currents result
from changes in temperature and pressure. When air heats up,
its molecules move around more rapidly, pushing each other farther apart.
The air becomes less dense and rises up through the
(22:13):
troposphere towards thinner air. In doing so, however, it moves
into colder regions, it begins to cool, and it eventually
cools down to a denser state and sinks back down. Okay,
So when the air in one area heats up faster
than the air in an enjoining area, the pressure differential
generates wind. For example, Uh, look, you can just look
at a modern city. All that concrete and steel observed
(22:33):
absorbs a much more heat than the surrounding countryside. As such,
the air in that city grows hotter during the day,
becomes less dense, and rises in a vertical movement known
as an updraft. Meanwhile, the cooler air in the countryside
is under far more pressure and begins to flow into
the city in the form of surface wind to fill
the low pressure area. Once it enters the hot city, however,
(22:53):
it heats up and begins to rise in an updraft.
The air above it cools, but it can't settle back
into place due to all the rise hot air underneath it. Instead,
the cooling air simply pushes out to the side in
the form of an upper air wind heading back to
the countryside, and this wind cycle continues in a nightfall
sends everything into reverse as the city cools faster than
the surrounding areas. So to put this into the form
(23:15):
of a simplified version of the Earth, imagine an Earth
that doesn't rotate and doesn't experience night In this example,
let's also pretend that the sun heats the areas around
the equator the most, and the poles the least. This
is a lot like the city example, except the entire
equatorial belt would be the city in the scenario, and
the land and sea cooling towards the poles would be
(23:35):
the countryside that This would result in two massive bowl
shaped convection cells, one for each hemisphere. Surface flows of
cool air would sweep toward the equator, heating up along
the way. Upon arrival, this air would ascend in an updraft,
and then it would sweep back toward the poles in
a cooling upper air wind. So there's a simplified version
of how air moves in the real world. It's all
(23:56):
about about pressure differentials and air swooping into one area,
rising and swooping back across over the top. Okay, yeah,
So in a nutshell, you've got the sun which is
heating the molecules. They rise because they they've got high
pressure now, and then you've got low pressure more condensed
air rushing into displace. That we're talking about displaced air,
and that's how winds are creating. That's how air moves about,
(24:17):
and it creates this circular movement of air. Right, So
you have a circulation cell, so you have certain areas
that become this this closed loop. And when you look
at Dante's inferno, you have to circulation cells. And the
first one starts, of course, at the very beginning, and
it ends at the city of This. Okay, because you
have again all of this weather happening, this heat from
(24:41):
the city of This, which is informing things at say,
the first circle of Hell. Yeah, and pluses of boiling
river next to it, so you have the hat heading
to the possible heat as well. Um. So yeah, hot
air rises from the sixth circle just beyond the walls
of dis and then it rolls back towards the gates
of Hell at a high altitude and then sinks back
down at the first circle of Hell, and it sweeps
across the surface till it blows through diss and back
(25:03):
up the sixth circle again. So that's the the upper
circulation cell as laid out by Serviny. But then he
also says that are Dante's text lays out this lower
circulation cell as well. Yeah. Now that second loop stretches
from the rising air of the the fiery city of
discs as it redistributes air towards the central pit of Hell,
(25:24):
and it sinks into the bone freezing cold um of
the Cosatukcitis excuse me lake, and then it makes its
way back over Malbolga, which is the terraced area, and
then back up to the city of Diss. So that's
your second circulation cell. Yes now, and I'm gonna I'll
sketch out a little version of what this looks like
(25:45):
and include this on the website so you can you
can look at it. It's it's really incredible because Serveni
makes a really strong case that you if you look
at the meteorological details that are included in Inferno, and
there are a lot of them, because because Dante's clearly
a weather bug, and it included all these details along
with all these other world building details of what Inferno
consisted of. But you you read the details, you read
(26:05):
about the movements of air and the descriptions of what
the wind is doing and what the temperature is doing.
It clearly spells out a working um to sell air
circulation system. It does, and we can actually run through
every single point or every single circle and help, but
we won't do that. But I did want to talk
about a couple of them because it's really interesting. Uh.
(26:26):
Servening talks about in the vegetable in the first circle.
That these are dominated by high pressure with pretty calm winds.
But when Virgil and Dante enter the second circle, them
with a stormy blast of hell and um. This is
where Servenny says the strong pressure gradient causes winds as
a function of the high and low pressure systems. And
this is kind of a nice touch because when you
(26:48):
go into the second circle, it's extremely windy, and this
is where the lustful are punished and the winds are
whipping around them, the winds of their desires. And then
of course you go in the third circle and there's
lots of showers and uh, that's that's where it's really
heavy and cold wind and it's really stank there by
the way. Um. And then the third circle of course
(27:09):
has glotony and there's intense storms. Um. And again this
is a result of the strong surface heat blowing back
from the city of Discs and the low pressure system
that exists in the valley that descends before Dante in Virgil.
So again, as you say, Dante had a really good
idea of how weather systems were working, a good enough
idea to try to imagine it in this place and
(27:31):
set the territory and the geography to the weather conditions.
It's kind of beautiful. It is, I mean, it's it's
amazing to think of because it's I mean, you'd be
hard pressed to find an earlier, more fully formed world
in in in literature and in someone's mind, as as
as the Inferno and Them and Purgatory in Paradise as well.
(27:55):
But but certainly Infernos the best of the three because
it's it's it's where you have all these rich, gross details.
That's where you have demons playing trumpets with their butts. Um.
You don't encounter much of that though, the higher up
you get, so there's less because because Dante's Inferno is
rather humorous at times, there is some good schatology and yeah, yeah,
and of course because there's so much treacherous detail that
(28:17):
he had to put some sort of comedy elements in
there just as a little break. Now, some people would
take issue with gravity, yes, because in Dante's Inferno, when
Dante in Virgil are descending, they're experiencing the same kind
of gravity that they would on the surface of Earth.
So if they're crossing a bridge or you know, if
(28:40):
they're dodging arrows, or you know, some sort of missile
as with hell Um. Then that's all being acted on
as if everything were normal. But things, of course, as
we know, would not be normal. If you plunged down
into Earth. Well now, I've read arguments though that that
cross gravity is is due to mass, and so you
(29:00):
have the gravity on the Earth is determined by the
amount of mass involved. I've read arguments though that that
that you descended deeper, it would be about the mass
around you, and that would that would determine how much
up a gravitational pull was beneath your feet. It would
slow you down because there's more there's more mass above
you and around you, so your descent would be slower.
(29:20):
In fact, we have a really good article by Nicholas
Gurbas called what would happen if I drolled the tunnel
through the center of the Earth and jumped into it?
Now that's a little bit different. We're talking about a
free fall jump as opposed to just descending in but
the idea is essentially the same. It is, but in
gurbs article he does say that at the core as
you as you get to the core the planet's center,
(29:41):
your acceleration uh due to gravity is zero, and Earth's
maths around you, and then gravity cancels out and you
are weightless. And a curious thing happens along these lines.
In Dante's Inferro, at the very end, after they've worked
their way to the very bottom, the like Accitis, they
see the massive Lucifer there with his three faces, ting
(30:02):
on the three great traders of Western civilization. Uh. They
go up and the way out is down, and they
start climbing down the furry shanks of Lucifer. Uh. And
remember his clatches the center of of of the planet
in this model. So what happens when they reach the
very center, Well, there is up as down and down
(30:23):
as up, just as if you were in space, right.
And this is called the antipodes. Yeah, this is what
NASA has to say about it. This is from Angela
Richard about the center of the Earth, not about Lucifer's hinder. Uh.
She says, if you could be at the exact center,
the forces that each bit of Earth matter exerted on
you would counsel out up, canceling down, east, canceling west, etcetera.
(30:45):
This only occurs for a single point, though, and you
would still feel a gravitational force on the rest of
your body. So there would be this point that where
things would switch, and that's what happens to Virgil and Dunte. Yeah,
and Servendice says that Dante may have lifted this concept
from first century writer Plutarch, who said, if a man
should so coalesce with the earth that its center is
(31:06):
at his navel, the same person at the same time
has his head up and his feet up too. So yeah,
this idea that the portal kind of shifts. And this
is actually taken from Dante's Inferno. It says, and when
we had come to where the huge thigh bone rides
in its socket, that the haunts swell my gude with
labor and great exertion, turned head to where his feet
(31:29):
had been, and fell to hoisten himself up in the air,
so that I thought us mounting back to Hell. In
other words, this is he's completely discombobled and trying to
figure out where he is and he sees this different
view of Satan's hairy leg. Yeah. Now, some of this
also comes from Professor Andrew J. Simolson's article The Gravity
(31:53):
of Hell the Gravity of Hades rather and he gets
into a little Miltonian physics as well um Milton's A
Paradise Lost. Of course, we mentioned this uh briefly earlier
in this podcaster and the other one about Hell. Uh.
In Milton's Paradise Lost, Lucifer's and more relatable character, sympathetic character,
and the dark Angel. He's the dark Angel and we
get to learn about his fall. So somos and looks
(32:15):
at this, and he's realized that naturally, Lucifer's fall from
Heaven to Hell is the perfect measuring stick to figure
out what is the distance between Heaven and Hell. So
in this article he looks at at Lucifer's descent from
from Heaven to Hell and says, well, this would be
a great way of measuring the distance between Heaven and
Hell if we could figure out if we could apply
some equations to this. And that's what he does in
(32:37):
this paper. He applies a lot of mathematical computation to
what he can glean from the test from the text.
Uh and basically it says uh him Satan the almighty
power hurled headlong, flaming from the eternal sky with hideous
ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition and uh and
apparently it takes him about nine days to reach between
(33:01):
Heaven and Hell. So he starts breaking that down. Uh
you know, how how how great a distance would that be?
And then you also have to wonder, Okay, if this
occurred not long after the Big Bang, then maybe certain
laws are not applying. Is he bound by the speed
of light, is he bound by the uh, by the
speed of a physical object? Or is he surpassing it?
So it could take you know, forty million years, he figures,
(33:23):
if he was to reach the center of the Milky Way,
but it could take, you know, take a much shorter
amount of time if he's going faster than light. So
it's it's some some wonderful thought experimentation it's going on
in that article. Yeah, it's again, it's a wonderful Hell
is a wonderful idea to play with to explore our universe.
(33:44):
All right, Well, there you go. Hopefully we did not
lose you too much in the descriptions of hell and
the descriptions of weather in the real world. But uh,
but but again, look at some of these charts that
we're talking about. Look on the website, and I think
that should help it. I'll make a little more sense.
It's again it's very much in keeping with some of
these papers that are out there about about how the
(34:05):
how DNA works, how genetics work, and Harry Potter how
the solar system works in Game of Thrones. Uh, but
then it also hints it something greater. This the idea
that the science is this this way that we can
we can feel the unknown, we can reach out and
touch things that we haven't yet explored yet and and
try to figure out what is the black hole? Uh,
you know, what is dark matter. But then we can
(34:26):
also reach them into the imagined worlds and try and
figure out the limits of those worlds as well. Yeah,
I mean, what are the coordinates of Satan's touch exactly?
Science is still the science is still still out on that,
by the works. So in the meantime, if you would
like to get in touch with us, you can find
us in the usual ways. Again, that website is Stuff
to Abow your Mind dot com. You can also find
(34:48):
us on social media. We're on Twitter as Blow the Mind.
We're on Facebook and tumbler as Stuff to Blow your Mind.
On YouTube we are Mind Stuff Show and you can
always drop us a line at Blow the Mind at
Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
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