Sheesh, I have come to believe that modern scientists are not they're all cracked up to be. I question so much that "scientists" theorize. Funny how Copernicus and Newton and others were correct in their theories. Every time I watch Sheldon as a theoretical physicist with his white board on "Big Bang", I chuckle. Hey, how about that Haldron collider that didn't prove squat?
The term settled science isn't scientific, it's political. The problem for some people is that science is a method rather than a body of knowledge. When new information becomes available, previous ideas have to be amended or abandoned. By contrast, any new information has to be rejected by people who think they already know everything.
Copernicus' borrowed idea that the Sun was the center of the Universe isn't actually correct -- our Sun isn't even the center of the galaxy, something known thanks to new information. Newton believed that acceleration could go on indefinitely, but this was thrown out due to later observations, and Einstein's development of relativity.
Newton and others were also wrong about orbits -- Kepler was wrong at first, but realized that orbits are elliptical, with some more closley approaching circularity than others. That discovery was due to Tycho Brahe's and Kepler's own observations of the motion of Mars.