The Science of Hell

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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

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.

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. 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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 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

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 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

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 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. 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,

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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, 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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. 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 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 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

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