FROM DANTE’S UNIVERSE TO CONTEMPORARY COSMOLOGY

Abstract

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.