Galileo and His 'six long meetings' with Urban VIII in 1624

In August 1623, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, and in April 1624, Galileo went to Rome to pay his respects to his old friend. Before returning to Florence at the beginning of June 1624, Galileo, informed Federico Cesi that he had 'six long meetings' with Urban. This is the only reference by Galileo to the meetings. There is no mention of the content of their discussions in any of the correspondence with Cesi or anyone else, nor is there any record about what went on during their meetings. In this paper, I shall try to test the viability of another hypothesis and examine how consistent such a hypothesis is with respect to earlier as well as later developments. The hypothesis is that Urban asked Galileo to write a book about astronomy in which an Aristotelian philosopher would be in conversation with a mathematically trained natural philosopher, and as the discussions concerning astronomy and physics unfolded, the Aristotelian would start to embrace the ideas that the mathematician had initially articulated. Urban's suggestion was the result of his worries about the growing antagonisms among the Jesuits, the philosophers, the theologians, the astronomers and the natural philosophers and he aimed at reversing what was so dramatically provoked by Il Saggiatore.