1/ Gustave Doré’s illustration of Paradiso XXXI*:

2/ From An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” Garrett Lisi’s proposed model of the universe, which is based on the E8 geometry**:

 
* For a more serious attempt to relate Dante’s Divine Comedy to modern physics, see Mark A. Peterson’s “Dante and the 3-sphere”

** New Scientist has an article on Lisi’s theory here, and Lisi’s explanation of the theory “in terms a layman could understand” runs as follows:

Differential geometry is the study of smooth manifolds, usually in many dimensions — it’s calculus on steroids. There are ways of classifying symmetric manifolds, and this links up with all other branches of mathematics; so differential geometry is sort of a hub where a lot of mathematics comes together. Now, there is one manifold in particular — the largest simple exceptional Lie group manifold, E8 — that is the most beautiful. The system of roots in the picture I sent you describes the 248 symmetries of E8. What I’m working on is identifying each of the elementary particle fields of the standard model and gravity as one of these symmetries. It turns out that this match is… perfect, as far as I’ve been able to tell. This model is very new, and there are still things I don’t understand about it, but it looks perfect so far. You have to be very careful with these things though, as they can encounter a fatal difficulty at any turn — and when theory contradicts experiment, or requires unreasonable revision, you have to toss it and move on. But this theory of fitting all the standard model and gravitational fields into E8 is working very well so far.

When we have a nice symmetric manifold, like E8, we can mathematically describe how this shape twists and turns over the four dimensional spacetime we live in. This description is called a principal bundle, and the field describing the twists and turns is called a connection, which determines the curvature. What I’m doing is identifying all the standard model and gravitational fields (everything) as parts of an E8 principal bundle connection, and it’s working amazingly well — it appears to have all the correct fields and their interactions. Each symmetry of E8 is a different part of this connection, and each symmetry manifests itself as a different type of elementary particle that we have in our universe. When someone unifies gravity with the other fields like this, it’s called a Theory of Everything — that’s what I’m after.