Heaven is hotter than Hell: the 1972 paper that calculated Hell's temperature

It might not be the most serious research of the last 100 years, but, believe it or not, two scientists published a paper in a specialized journal that calculates the temperature of Hell itself. The paper, which appeared in 1972, oddly concludes that Heaven is hotter than Hell.

Yes, the title of this article might have left your jaw on the floor. It's not every day you see the words "scientist" and "Hell" in the same sentence. Nor is it every day someone picks up a computer and starts crunching numbers to find the temperature of Hell (even if such a thing doesn't exist).

The paper in question was submitted anonymously for publication in the Journal of Applied Optics in 1972. All we know is that the clever calculators were two in number and of English nationality. After spending many hours analyzing the problem, they discovered that Heaven is hotter than Hell: if you don't like hot places, then you'd better start sinning!

You're probably wondering what basis one could use as a starting point for such a calculation. In fact, it's impossible to take any measurement or sample that would yield a minimally credible result. However, these two gentlemen made use of different passages from the Bible to reach their revolutionary conclusions.

The temperature of Heaven

For example, from Isaiah 30:26: "The light of the moon will be like the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be seven times the light of seven days" we can, according to the study, calculate the temperature of Heaven. Let's see how: Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as the Earth receives from the Sun, and also seven times seven (yes, forty-nine) times what the Earth receives from the Sun. This gibberish, which sounds like a children's tongue twister, serves to determine that Heaven receives fifty times the radiation that the Earth receives.

Using physics, specifically the laws of thermal equilibrium and the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, and assuming the absolute temperature of the Earth is 300 degrees Kelvin (27 degrees Celsius for us poor humans), we can calculate the temperature of Heaven. Of course, we won't transcribe pages of calculations here, but if we are to believe the mathematical expertise of the paper's authors, Heaven is at about 798 degrees Kelvin, or 525 °C.

The temperature of Hell

To obtain the temperature of Hell, a passage known as Revelation 21:8 was used: "But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the sorcerers, the idolaters and all liars—their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur". As anyone knows, the evaporation temperature of sulfur is about 444.6 °C, and for a lake of sulfur to exist, this substance must be in a liquid state. For it not to evaporate, its maximum temperature should be lower than the aforementioned 444.6 °C.