How hott is hell?
"The English language treats the word Hell where measure anomalies abound. Somehow Hades can be both 'hot as Hell' 'cold as Hell'. This contradiction has lead some disgruntled Canadians to oppine that Ottowa, their hot/cold capitol is Hell, or at least Chicago north. But that is a discussion for another day. Our question is simpler: Is there a way of determining how hot Hell is, and how cold it would have to be for it to freeze over? It turns out that there is a venerable conclusion for the climate of Hell. It is attributed to a mysterious Mr. Wensel of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards and was reputedly made more than a half-century ago.
He proposed that the searing statement in Revelation 21:8, 'But the fearful, and unbelieving...shal have their part in the lake wich burneth with fire and brimstone," provided a temperature touchstone. In order for a lake of molten brimstone to exist, the temperature in Hell would have to be below 444.6 degrees C (832.3 degrees F). Fir, if it were not, goes this arguement, the brimstone and vapor would have to become a gas and not a lake.
However, Hell's relatively low temperature produces a divine anomaly. In Isaiah 30:26, there is a depiction of Heaven: "Moreover the light of the moon shall be as light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." When all this heating multiplication is rolled into one and the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth-power law for radiation is applied, it turns out that the angels are floating about in an ether heated to 525 degrees C (977 degrees F). Ergo, by this calculation it may be hot in Hell, but Heaven is even hotter.
Alas for the simple minds who would like to blithely depress the pious with this paradox. it seems that every time someone trots out Mr. Wensel's numbers, some skeptic points out that some earthly assumption is at work -- namely, that the pressure in Hell is the same as the pressure on the Earth's surface at sea level. And that surely is wrong, if for no other reason than Hades's placement in the area we euphemistically term 'below'. Under intense pressures, brimstone can stay liquid to 1,040 degrees C (about 1,904 degrees F), but it would take only 4.2 atmospheres, which is a bit less that our veins can withstand without rupturing and less than 1/17 of the pressure of a 50-kg (110-lb) woman would exert at the tips of her stiletto heels, to make Hell even hotter than Heaven.
But soft, if we assume that there is enough pressure-- 32 atmospheres --to reach the 1,040 degrees C figure, then a series of back-of-the-envelope calculations indicates that the temperature would have to fall to about 116 degrees C (about 241 degrees F) -- hotter than the temperature at which water boils at sea level-- for the lake of sulfur to turn to solid. That goes up a bit if we increase the pressure enormously -- something like 800 atmospheres -- but it appears that 116 degrees C (241 degrees F) is about as cold as any reasonable Hell would get before its sulfur lakes froze over.
Thus we might suggest that, the next time anyone complains about the muggy heat of an Ottawa or Chicago August, he or she should think again. However steamy the city gets, it is still much, much colder than Hell." ~~~The Sizesaurus- Steven Strauss