Galileo and Hell: do the math

This video and story from The Boston Globe via Open Culture ....

Mark Peterson, a physics professor at Mount Holyoke College, will publish a new book where he makes a rather curious argument: Back in 1588, a young Galileo presented two lectures before the Florentine Academy. And there he laid the groundwork for his theoretical physics when he called into question the accepted measurements of Dante’s hell (as depicted in the Inferno, the great epic poem from 1314) ...

Read more about it at The Boston Globe here.


- Inferno, from the Divine Comedy by Dante (Folio 1v) by Bartolomeo di Fruosino, 1430-35, Tempera, gold, and silver on parchment, 365 x 265 mm, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris