Einstein meets Dante Alighieri

Abstract

The article comments on a passage from the book "Reality is not as it appears to us" by the theoretical physicist and popularizer Carlo Rovelli. The article highlights a surprising analogy between the conception of the universe that Einstein describes in the theory of General Relativity and that which Dante Alighieri tries to describe in canto XXX of Paradise when, having arrived in the last heaven, he simultaneously sees the celestial circles with the Earth at the center and the angelic circles. He is unable to give an intuitive description of the relationship between these two entities, other than to say that each of the two is contained and at the same time contains the other. Rovelli sees, and argues, in this concept the description of a Three-Sphere, a four-dimensional geometric figure that corresponds exactly to the structure of the Einsteinian Universe.