5 May 2016

Measuring Dante's Hell

From Our Changing World, 9:16 pm on 5 May 2016
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Circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno Photo: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 INFOGRAFIKA

Len Fisher is a physicist at the University of Bristol. He’s an expert in stickiness, especially of cells, and won the Ig Nobel prize for the physics of dunking biscuits. In 'Measuring Dante's Hell' he reveals how - and why - Galileo calculated the dimensions of the roof of Dante's Hell, and how this led to his discovery of the laws of mechanics that engineers use to this day.

This story first played on the programme 'Ockham’s Razor' on ABC’s Radio National.