If they were wrong, people would dismiss them. It has nothing to do with brilliancy. For example, you forget about Neils Bohr and how he used to have discussions at length with Albert Einstein, and Einstein never quite came to terms with quantum mechanics.
a large part of the scientific society still assumes them to be correct.
It's not the scientists' job to be proving all the time that some ideas are correct. They work on a subject, and when they're satisfied with it they move further. If they get stuck, THEN they backtrack and see where they got it wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLaRXYai1…
But I have to recognize that high school gives a completely distorted impression of Physics and Mathematics, as something that is "set in stone", and so on. Yes, there are things called "laws" that we know happen all the time, because we've never seen them happening in other ways; and laws don't explain anything, they only tell you what happen -- not WHY. And kids grow up thinking that's what science is all about -- looking for laws.
Then you get to college, do your first lab works where you try to measure things like the acceleration of gravity from the period and length of a pendulum, and instead of 9.8 m/s^2 you get 9.2 m/s^2 and you get wierded out. Some of your colleagues may even suggest that you just write 9.8 m/s^2, because after all that's what you learnt in high school! How can it be anything other than that? Then you realize that you got it wrong because your fingers are greasy and the little pendulum ball sticks on your finger and so it doesn't take exactly that amount of time to swing, and that the string of the pendulum chaffes against the holder, and all of these affect your measurement. And you learn to calculate the experimental uncertainty and you get 1.1 m/s^2 uncertainty and you're again angered that you got such a LOWSY precision! You try again and again, and you get results all scattered around an average, 9.6 m/s^2. Almost there -- but not yet! Someone in the other table got 10.7 m/s^2. What's going on?!