The unexpected science hiding in Dante’s ‘Inferno’

Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy is a famous Italian poem. It tells the story of Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Timothy Burbery, an English professor at Marshall University, suggests Dante was also an accidental geophysicist.

Burbery believes Dante's Inferno shows an early understanding of geophysics and geology. This was long before scientists formally discovered these concepts. He points to two main examples: a strange flight and Satan's fall.

Dante's Accidental Science

In the poem, Dante travels through Hell, which has nine circles. At one point, he flies on a creature called Geryon. Dante, the character, notes he can't feel the motion of flight. Burbery explains that this sensation of not feeling movement while moving is called the "inertial frame of reference" in physics. Dante, the author, couldn't have known this scientific term.

Burbery's second example is Dante's description of Satan falling from Heaven to Earth. Beyond the spiritual meaning, Dante describes this fall as a physical event. Satan is shown as a large object with mass and speed. He plummets to Earth from beyond Saturn's orbit, changing the landscape.

Burbery suggests Dante's devil acts like a meteorite or asteroid. When Satan hits Earth, he creates Hell, which is like a bottom-up crater.

"Satan plunges to earth from a massive height," Burbery explains. "He picks up tremendous speed. When he slams into the earth, he tunnels to its core. The dirt he excavates forms Mount Purgatory. He also causes the continents in the Southern Hemisphere to flee to the Northern Hemisphere. And he creates the cone, or crater, of Hell, in the Northern Hemisphere."

Scholars disagree on whether Satan's fall actually created Hell in the poem. However, Burbery notes that these literary effects hint at how asteroids and meteorites reshape Earth and form craters.

Of course, there are differences between Satan's fall and real meteorites. Satan reached Earth's center, but meteorites don't go that deep. Also, some scholars believe Satan's impact was indirect, while meteorites have a direct effect.

The Physics of Satan's Impact

Burbery says Dante is unique in thinking about the geophysics of such a long fall. Other myths, like Icarus, involve falls from much lower heights. No other writer seems to have described the physics of a landing like Satan's. By treating Satan's fall as physical, Dante had to consider its impact on Earth.

"Nobody had really thought through, either with Satan or other mythological figures like Icarus, 'what would it be like if they actually slammed into the earth?'" Burbery told Popular Science. "So he is doing proto geology and proto geophysics, just in imagining this idea that something could fall in."

Dante might not have seen impact craters, but he may have known about volcanoes like Mount Etna or Mount Vesuvius. These could have inspired his description of Satan's impact. This would make that part of Inferno an accidental, yet predictive, thought experiment.

By giving Satan an extraterrestrial origin, Dante also unknowingly hinted at the extraterrestrial origins of meteors. This wasn't scientifically proven until 1803, centuries after The Divine Comedy was written in the 14th century.

Acknowledging Aristotle

Dante was curious about geological events like earthquakes and landslides, which appear in his work. However, Burbery explains that Dante himself would have disagreed with this meteoric interpretation. In Dante's time, people believed in Aristotle's model of the cosmos. This model stated that the skies beyond the moon were unchanging. Meteors were thought to be local Earth events, not objects from space.

"If you would have asked him about meteors, he would have said, 'no, I go with Aristotle here,'" Burbery says. Dante even mentions Aristotle's model in Paradiso. "But somehow he still had this physical understanding of these things, even though he wasn’t admitting it. He’s talking about Satan, the spiritual being, and yet he’s treating him as a physical body plunging down from space."

Burbery shared an early version of his ideas at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. He plans to publish a research paper on this topic.