Well this was a bit of shoddy history of science that was aggressively waved in my face by a writer who very eager to get to the sequel, whose title one may suspect will contain the words "I", "genius" and little else...

I mean, one of the things Newton famously wrote was "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." which isn't entirely in the spirt of the long genius myth.

And if Galileo is allowed into the genius pantheon, what to do with the little episode where he convinced the contemporary world that comets were actually just clouds...