Hell: The Chemistry of

A retiring Physical Chemistry professor was setting his last exam, for a
graduate course in Statistical Thermodynamics. Being a bit bored with it
all, and with a well kept and wry sense of humour, he set a single question
on the sheet :

Is Hell endothermic or exothermic ?
Support your answer with proof.

He had little idea what to expect, or how to grade the results, but decided
to reward any student who was able to come up with a reasonable and
consistent reply to his query. One A was awarded.

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law or some
variant. The top student however wrote the following :

First, we postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass. If
they do, then a mole of souls can also have a mass. So, at what rate are
souls moving into hell and at what rate are souls leaving ?

I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets into hell, it will
not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for souls entering hell, lets look at the different religions that exist
in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a
member of their religion, you will go to hell. Since there are more than one
of the religions and people do no belong to more than one religion, we can
project that all people and 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 in volume in hell. Boyle's Law states
that in order for the temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same, the
ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant. There are two
possible conditions.

One, 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
exponentially until all hell breaks loose.

Conversely, 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, condition two.

We can solve this with the 1990 postulation of Theresa LeClair, the girl who
lived across the hall from me in first year residence. Since I have still
not been successful in obtaining sexual relations with her, condition two
above has not been met, and thus it can be concluded that condition one is
true, and hell is exothermic.