[kragen]

yes, but it depends on the field. ramanujan had the great advantage of working in a field where ideas can be tested with pencil and paper. if you show a purported ramanujan a lacuna in his proof, or if you can't find one, that's pretty good evidence

it's much harder to skim the dross off a leonardo, to correct your mixed metaphor, because siege engines and flying machines require empirical testing, and that's expensive. within the hypothetico-deductive method you can tell whether someone's logic is incorrect (just as with ramanujan) but if they're proposing a different hypothetical basis, you often have to test it empirically

often you can proceed from their proposed hypotheses to obviously empirically false conclusions. but historically that hasn't been an especially good guide; in the 19th century kelvin proved that the sun was younger than the earth, demonstrating that something was wrong with his hypothetico-deductive framework, but it took quite a while to figure out what. and today relativity and quantum mechanics are widely considered irreconcilable