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Notes -
The greatest minds of all generations are considered as such due to years if not decades of deep thought, not because of the off the cuff ripostes. Newton's magnum opus was the result him being so consumed by his work, he forgot to even consume food. He was also painfully shy and if he would forced to defend his hypotheses against a hostile interluctor, more interested in defeding Aristotelism than the truth, fan of the Greek guy would appear victorious.
Luckily, he lived in a time in which the written word was common place and the printing press which speedup the process of dissemation of ideas even further. When objections arose he was able to consider and respond to them asynchronously.
Or the Fermat-Pascal correspondance. Two pioneers in probability poking holes in the others formula for the expected value of a interrupted best-out-N game. Had they forgone letters and were instead each given five minutes and five minutes to respond, the problem would have been solved by someone else.
When it comes to my academic work, I have absolutely already thought about every detail far more intensively than anyone who questions me about it, and I have to regularly go in front of highly-educated people who are not shy in the least about trying to question every aspect that they can think of. I've seen some folks get absolutely blindsided by questions in the past, but those folks are usually either new to a field or just have sub-par work generally. (Academic work, like everything, follows Sturgeon's Law; there are a lot of sub-par academics.)
Worst case, you're dealing with someone whose brain is just completely stuck in a different way of thinking, which can easily happen if you're doing something genuinely novel, especially if the old methods have been established for decades, such that folks have essentially 'grown up' just doing the method, not thinking about it, figuring that all the thinking about it was done decades ago. But if you know this, as Newton would have surely known about his predecessors in detail, it's not too difficult to come up with concrete examples which definitively show that the old methods cannot be blindly applied. This is absolutely a top priority for my own work, refining these examples to their barest, with maximum force against the old way of thinking. It surely was for Newton and others. Many of the major defining moments in science/mathematics are not actually the new method, but the bold, undeniable counterexample demonstrating that the old method is broken. Then follows the new approach.
I have zero doubt that Newton would succeed in this challenge, but that is in part due to what is ultimately the narrowness of academic inquiry.
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