Coffee!! Early modern scientists had fun!

Spain-based writer Chris Wright notes in “Measuring hell: Was modern physics born in the Inferno?” (Boston Globe, January 9, 2011):

Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo's most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one. But that's the argument that Mount Holyoke College physics professor Mark Peterson has been developing for the past several years: specifically, that one of Galileo's crucial contributions to physics came from measuring the hell of Dante's Inferno. Or rather, from disproving its measurements.

Okay, but Dante was writing an epic, for which Inferno was the first big backdrop. Like modern sci fi filmmakers, he fuzzed the physics a bit.

So? Hell is a spiritual reality, but staging a drama that includes characters touring hell, Dante’s gotta make a scene. Like I told Larry Krauss, who was grousing recently about Trek physics, people don’t go to big box office to learn physics, and in Dante’s day, they didn’t read epics for that either.

But  wasn’t a waste of time:

Debating the mechanics of the Inferno might sound like intellectual horseplay, the 16th-century equivalent of MIT cafeteria debates about the viability of "Star Trek" teleporters. But there was more to the lectures than this. The insights Galileo gleaned from analyzing Dante's measurements in fact anticipated a vital principle of structural engineering. By asserting that you cannot create a giant Lucifer by super-sizing 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.


Typically, historians have dismissed these lectures as an inventive but relatively unimportant flourish on Galileo's part, a mere prelude to his subsequent theories concerning so-called scaling laws. But Peterson sees the lectures as being central to the Italian's greatest contributions to the history of thought. In applying mathematical models to Dante's hell, he argues, Galileo was laying the groundwork for what would become theoretical physics. "This was not just a clever entertainment," he says, "but something deeper, something closer to the mystery of what made the Scientific Revolution."

More coffee.

Dante's proton

Physicist Bob Estes draws my attention to his post, Dante's Heavenly Vision and the Physics of the Proton:

Now I want to consider Dante’s attempt to convey through poetry the mysterious concept of the Holy Trinity, which in his faith was a certainty. On reading the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso recently, I came across an image that immediately reminded me of something else I’d thought of before: the conceptual similarities between our scientific description of the proton and the Triune God; only now a particular detail of Dante’s description of what he had seen made the similarity appear stronger than I had realized before.

Near the end of his time in Heaven (Paradiso) Dante was finally empowered to behold God, his ability to comprehend mysteries directly by sight alone having been enabled by Divine grace. Here is the Singleton translation of lines 115-120 of Canto XXXIII of Paradiso.

“Within the profound and shining subsistence of the lofty Light appeared to me three circles of three colors and one magnitude; and one seemed reflected by the other, as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the other.”

This is far from being a clear picture, and Dante had said beforehand that description—even distinct memory—of what he had beheld was impossible. But I was struck this time by how much Dante’s word-painting resembles our own nebulous physical picture of the proton. The essentials of Dante’s vision were three equally sized circles (or spheres) of three colors and two distinguishable types, with some sort of continual interaction occurring among the circles. The image of the rainbows reflected in each other, with each circle yet of a different color, seems to my mind to be saying that the colors are changing, but in a co-ordinated way. I might add that Dante’s original description of God was as a point of blindingly bright white light.

Well, I have long been a Dante fan (illustrations here), and the illustration above is from an edition of the Paradiso.

(Note: This illustration aims at a different point from Dr. Estes', namely that all the blessed are linked as all the petals of a flower are linked to its stem. Thus questions of precedence in Paradise are not matters for envy. Wherever the petal is placed, it is linked to the stem that nourishes it.)