RE; Isaac Newton:

: I think that happens more often than not. Nothing wrong with it, it sometimes
: needs an outsider to formalise what is known as 'common knowledge', which
: isn't so common, so that those "not in the know" can know.

A commedian once asked: "Ever wonder what the world was like before Newton discovered gravity?"

Everybody knew that things fell, but he was the one who told them why.

Newton's work on tides was not just a compilation of of musty old data. He noticed differences in tide heights and times of tides, and was able to use that to show that the moon had an elliptical orbit, to measure the distance from the earth to the moon, to factor in the added influence of the sun's position on tides, and in the meantime he developed his theory of gravitation--which relied heavily on the accumulated data. I don't think he set out to figure why apples regularly fell from tress, he was trying to figure why oceans irregularly rise from their beds.

Interestingly, the wikipedia bio of Newton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton) doesn't mention his works on tides, which played a memorable part in the bio I listened to. Oh, and the wikipedia bio corrects me. It wasn't Descartes who also invented calculus, it was Leibniz. My bad.

PGJ