Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy is one of the most famous Italian literary works, if not the most famous. The medieval narrative poem is divided into three sections—Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise)—and chronicles Dante’s  fictional travels through the three regions. However, Marshall University English professor Timothy Burbery, says that Dante is more than just an author and character. He’s also an accidental geophysicist. Simply put, Burbery argues that Dante’s Inferno demonstrates an intuitive understanding of certain aspects of geophysics and geology long before they were formally discovered by scientists. Burbery points to two examples that particularly emphasize this idea of anticipated science: a flight on a strange creature and Satan’s fall from grace. The devil fell from space In the poem, Dante is guided through Hell, which the Roman poet Virgil described as a series of nine concentric circles. At one point, the duo fly on the back of a hybrid creature called Geryon to get from …