"Appeal to authority" is more than "mentioning the existence of authorities". This is not an appeal to authority.
The point is, if the answer was as simple as that, it wouldn't be a problem. This is not news. This is a century+ old conundrum, and you can't solve it by simply reciting Physics 101 as if that's it, book closed. It's the equivalent of listening to a operating systems researcher describe a thorny problem in the creation of a multitasking operating system on a hundred-core NUMA system, and then pedantically, slowly, patronizingly explaining back to them how functions work by pushing things on to a stack and then popping them afterwards.
When they favor you afterwards with a deeply shocked expression, it's not in amazement at your penetrating insights.
Still sounds like "Appeal to authority" to me. To speak to your analogy, I am involved in the field of computers, and I've seen first hand "experts" in this field build big complicated systems, that maybe had some merit at some point in time, but as the context changed with new developments and technologies, a young upstart built something much more simple that made the expert's system look like a mess. This is relevant because the context of what we understand is very different from Newton's time. School children have a more accurate depiction of the laws that govern our reality than the tops minds at the time, who believed in such things as phlogiston and the earth-centric universe.
