BIBLICAL scholars can rest a little easier now that two physicists and a
bishop have decided that the furnaces of Hell are indeed hotter than Heaven.
In 1972, science waded into the domain of theology with an anonymous article
in Applied Optics (vol 11, p A14) stating that Heaven must be hotter
than Hell. The paper noted that Revelation 21:8 describes a lake in
Hell 鈥渨hich burneth with fire and brimstone鈥�. For there to be such a lake,
Hell鈥檚 temperature must be below the boiling point of sulphur, just under 718 K
at atmospheric pressure.
Meanwhile, Isaiah 30:26 describes the lighting in Heaven, where 鈥渢he
light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun, and the light of the Sun
shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days鈥�. Using Stefan鈥檚 law, which
states that the temperature of an object in thermal equilibrium is related to
the fourth root of the amount of light it receives, the paper鈥檚 authors
calculated Heaven鈥檚 temperature to be a sweltering 798 K.
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In a letter published in the latest issue of the magazine Physics
Today, Jorge Mira P茅rez and Jose Vi帽a, physicists at the
University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, say that the Applied
Optics authors misinterpreted the Isaiah passage, wrongly
multiplying 7 by 7 to make the illumination in Heaven 49 times as bright as that
experienced by us on Earth.
After Bishop Eugenio Ramiro Pose of Madrid confirmed that only a single
factor of 7 was intended, P茅rez and Vi帽a recalculated Heaven鈥檚
temperature as 504.5 K鈥攂listeringly hot, but probably cooler than Hell. 鈥淎
lot of colleagues, joking with me, have said that they prefer to stay on Earth,鈥�
says P茅rez.