“Comment on ‘Galileo’s Discovery of Scaling Laws’, by Mark A. Peterson [Am. J. Phys. 70 (6), 575–580 (200222ya)]–Galileo and the Existence of Hell”, 2002-10-14 ():
[Pesic discusses Peterson’s theory of Galileo’s focus on scaling laws in Two New Sciences as reflecting belated publication of a theory developed to analyze the physical possibility of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Peterson suggests Galileo was embarrassed at having refuted his own arguments and shown it impossible, and simply delayed publishing to avoid attack.
Pesic suggests an additional consideration: religious Catholic orthodoxy of the sort Galileo would later run afoul of. By refuting even just Dante’s Hell, Galileo would cast some doubt on the official Catholic & Ptolemaic cosmologies, treating close to heresy.]
Though the exact location of hell was not a matter of faith, its existence was a tenet of Catholic belief and its negation thus heretical. Thus, in 1620 Giuseppe Rosaccio confidently described hell as being within the earth, noting that an enormous space was needed in view of the ever increasing number of the damned, who had no right to expect as much room as the blessed souls in heaven.14