https://doi.org/10.4081/scie.2016.543
FROM DANTE’S UNIVERSE TO CONTEMPORARY COSMOLOGY
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Pubblicato: 3 marzo 2020
A reading of the Divina Commedia with the eyes of a modern scientist reveals that Dante devoted great attention to the description of a wide variety of natural phenomena, particularly those involving astronomy, optics and geometry. A remarkable case is the structure of the cosmos emerging from the Paradiso, which foreshadows a non-Euclidean geometrical structure with remarkable similarities to Einstein’s 1917 static cosmological solution. Such model, however, as well as other solutions with pos-itive spatial curvature, are ruled out by current astrophysical observations. Here I discuss Dante’s geometric intuition and show its close analogy with the shape of the observable cosmic space-time in the standard CDM expanding model, fully supported by present-day cosmological data.