Scholar argues Dante's Inferno anticipated impact physics centuries early

Seven centuries before planetary science could name what he was imagining, Dante Alighieri may have encoded the physics of catastrophic celestial impact into the architecture of Hell itself. Researcher Timothy Burbery of Marshall University proposes that Satan's fall in the Inferno is not merely a theological metaphor but a proto-geophysical model — a high-velocity collision reshaping Earth's crust, carving craters, and displacing continents in ways that eerily anticipate modern meteoritics. The study invites us to consider how human imagination, long before formal science, may have reached to