A recent article has stated that Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy offers a cosmology that closely resembles what Einstein expressed in his general theory of Relativity. Is there any truth in this?
In another
post in this blog I summarized the history of cosmology, from the
geocentric Greek version formalized by Ptolemy, to the modern version by
Copernicus, Kepler and Newton. It is evident that Dante, who wrote the Divine
Comedy at the beginning of the fourteenth century, could not know about modern
cosmology, but he did know the Ptolemaic system, which he adopted in its
entirety, with an important addition.
The relationship between the systems of Dante and Einstein was pointed out in an article published in Scientific American in August 1976, written by J.J. Callahan and entitled The curvature of space in a finite universe. This article compares Newton's universe (finite, non-homogeneous, Euclidean and with one center), Leibnitz's (infinite, homogeneous, Euclidean and without a center) and Einstein's (finite, homogeneous, non-Euclidean and without a center). By adapting to Euclid's plane geometry, the first two can be represented by graphic models as those in the attached figure.
