The premise that Galileo’s application of mathematical models to Dante’s hell laid the foundations of modern theoretical physics may well be true as far as it goes.

But this of course misses a much larger point. Galileo’s brave debunking of centuries of jive “science”, much of it done in bad faith, came at a price. His refusal to approach the Inferno on its own terms — as metaphor, true or otherwise depending on your philosophical allegiances — opened a rift between the spiritual and the material that the West has struggled to bridge ever since.