Hobbes and White were among the most brilliant people of their day, and yet most of their scientific hypotheses about such things as the causes of wind, tides, ocean currents, the motion of the moon, gravitation, the position of the earth’s axis, interaction between the sun and moon, and the rotation of the earth and moon would strike us as ludicrous today. They did not happen to fix on what proved to be the right course. Scientific greatness is partially a matter of luck.

(A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 193)