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The piece quoted above appears to have begun its Internet life as a joke posted to the newsgroup rec.humor in 1997. Its roots, however, are far older: It has antecedents in a 1920's-era piece written by Dr. Paul Darwin Foote [PDF], a scientist noted for his pioneering work in the field of high temperature measurement, which appeared in the house organ of the Taylor Instrument Company. In that article, The Temperature of Heaven and Hell, Foote drew scientific deductions from descriptions of the states of various material substances as described in the Bible to conclude that Heaven was hotter than Hell. That item was penned as a humor piece and was written at a time in Foote's career when he was well established, thus any notion that it was the work of a cheeky student out to impress his professor should be dismissed. The same item subsequently appeared as a story published in a 1962 book (The Mathematical Magpie, which reprinted it from a 1960 magazine article), and as a parody published in a 1972 edition of Applied Optics which was attributed to an unnamed environmental physicist of several decades back: An article published in a 1979 edition of the Journal of Irreproducible Results written by Dr. Tim Healey (penned as a response to the Applied Optics piece) carried the joke one step further by offering a refutation proving that Hell was indeed hotter than Heaven. In typical urban legend fashion, what had started out many years earlier as an obvious bit of tongue-in-cheek humor was apparently eventually transformed into a version touting it as a true story. It's difficult to definitively prove one form of the legend is the direct descendant of the other since Foote's original and the modern Internet version are substantially different tales, but both of them are humor pieces based on the specialized concept of using thermodynamics to measure the properties of heat associated with Hell. (Either way, it's highly unlikely that a real thermodynamics professor would give graduate students an exam consisting of a single vague question with no definite solution which required the application of Biblical principles to answer, unless it was intended as a joke.) Interestingly enough, the Internet-circulated version's opening gambit, We postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass, stands in opposition to the position taken centuries ago by the Roman Catholic Church. The Holy See had given its official approval to a particular line of scientific thought, the vacuum (places where measurable matter does not exist), to specifically allow for immaterial forms such as weightless souls and armies of angels in what would otherwise be a filled universe. Without vacuums, both Heaven and Hell as well as all their denizens would have no place in the cosmic order of things. The time-honored Aristotelian assertion Nature abhors a vacuum had to be (and was) elbowed out of the way because the vacuum was a theological necessity.
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