I was split as to whether this should go in Religion and Beliefs, and Science and Reason, so I chose to put it in here
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2008/1114/1226408633848.html"THE MAGPIE: Now that the US presidential election is out of the way [originally posted Nov 14 08], Magpie last week held out the prospect this week of a dollop of silliness.
However, an e-mail from a pal at commercial property people Jones Lang LaSalle (they've a lot of time on their hands at JLL these days) suggests this is not the moment for frivolity.
The e-mail was on the weighty matter of the nature of hell, as allegedly posed by a Dr Robert Shambaugh of the University of Oklahoma school of chemical engineering. It purports to be a final exam question from May 1997. Shambaugh, says the e-mail, is known for asking questions such as "why do airplanes fly?" on exam papers.
His May 1997 question for his Momentum, Heat and Mass Transfer II class was: "Is hell exothermic or endothermic? Support your answer with proof."
Magpie was delighted with the following answer, as was Doc Shambaugh (allegedly).
Most of his students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's law which, as we know you know, describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system, or some variant thereof.
One student, however, wrote the following: "First, we need to know how the mass of hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.
"Most of these religions state that, if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to hell.
"Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in hell because Boyle's law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same, the volume of hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:
"1. If hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter hell, then the temperature and pressure in hell will increase until all hell breaks loose.
"2. If hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until hell freezes over.
"So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my freshman year that, 'It will be a cold day in hell before I sleep with you', and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.
"The corollary of this theory is that since hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct . . . leaving only heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting, 'Oh my God!'."
The author, it is claimed, got an A+ for the answer.
Topic: Here's a testing question: is hell exothermic of endothermic?