Abstract
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) AD wrote what is now considered one of the greatest works of world literature, the Divine Comedy — an allegorical vision of Christian afterlife. The focus here is a description of a universe that includes the Empyrean, which, among Christian poets, is the abode of God or the firmament. Dante constructs the Empyrean as a mirror image of the classical Aristotle universe, and then “glues their 2-sphere boundaries” to form a 3-sphere. We essentially follow the article Dante and the 3-sphere by Mark Peterson, American Journal of Physics 47 (1979).
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- 1.
An allegory is a description of one thing under the image of another.
- 2.
Translation by Mark Musa of line 4–9, Canto XXVIII, of Dante’s Paradiso. Art by Gustave Doré (1832–1883).
- 3.
The “mirror graphic” on the left was provided by Mary Fugier, who used Rhinoceros 3-D Software (www.rhino3d.com).
- 4.
The proof presented in Appendix 1 requires some background in either vector analysis or linear algebra. It is included for those readers who desire easy access to such a proof.
- 5.
Dante, Paradiso (Harvard Univ., Cambridge, 1972), Canto 28, lines 58–60.
- 6.
John Ciardi in Dante, The Paradiso (Mentor, New York, 1970), notes to Canto 28, lines 21–36, p. 313.
- 7.
Dante, Paradiso (Harvard Univ., Cambridge, 1972), Cantor 28, lines 46–78.
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Lipscomb, S.L. (2014). Dante’s 3-Sphere Universe. In: Art Meets Mathematics in the Fourth Dimension. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06254-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06254-9_2
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