Newton's great accomplishment was discovering a link between terrestrial and extraterrestrial physics.
Today on the large scale we see it takes multiple kinds of "dark matter" to explain the rotation of galaxies, structure of galaxy clusters, and cosmology. "Dark matter" evades any attempt to detect it on Earth.
Einstein's prediction of how light was bent in gravitational fields was tested by Sir Arthur Eddington in a few years. Last year observational evidence was found for a circa-1980 theory of black hole jets. Neutrino Oscillations were detected in 1998 and have been one of the few areas where particle accelerators get non-null results; the theory for that was developed in 1957 by an Italian physicist who defected to the Soviet Union. (No Nobel Prize!)
Since the gap between theory and confirmation of the theory could span a whole career, young physicists need to survive by pleasing their elders with fashionable theories for a decade without any feedback from the physical universe.
A strange counterexample was the 1980 rise of inflationary cosmology, where the problem and solution were discovered together. (Somehow nobody was bothered by the "Horizon Problem" until then.) It was Alan Guth's answer to survival in the physics hiring drought of his time.