>scientific awards are more interesting when leading indicators
Peter Higgs waited 50 years, the Nobel is not a "leading indicator." If it was, it would be given out on the basis of the "hype cycle," which would not be very helpful to anybody.
Sometimes science/engineering turns out like that
e.g. I think Claude Shannon is like that -- his impact continues to rise, and he's viewed as more important after he died
He apparently never won a Turing Award or Nobel Prize, probably because there was and is no Nobel in computer science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Awards_and_hono...
So I guess I mean "drawing attention to something that would have not otherwise had attention", and based on the consensus of people working in the field
Brilliant theorizing can be both brilliant and wrong.