Ivor,

First, while we may disagree on this issue, you are an awfully pleasant person to have a dsicussion with.

Here's my response to the great minds question:

I don't need to be concerned if a great mind believes differently than I do. In science we do not take anything on faith - even the beliefs of our heroes. We can do our own testing of claims. I can only speculate as to why any particular person might believe any particular thing (in this case, I might point out the antiquity of some of these great minds, and the fact that they believed all kinds of things that I do not...e.g. a heliocentric universe, the universal ether, etc....). But if faced with a specific claim, and if there is a way to test that claim, and if the test contradicts one of our dear heroes beliefs, it does not invalidate *all* of their other beliefs, nor their other contributions that may to this day withstand testing (although testing the beliefs of even an icon such as Newton is scientific fair game --- which is exactly what Einstein did with relativity: found situations where Newtonian physics are invalid!).