Do you have a sense of how long is typically the lag between an insight first being had, and being recognised as major? I think this might often be several years.
As an aside, there are a few papers examining this in the case of academia. One interesting finding is that there are a few outliers that only get widely recognized after decades, much longer than for typical insights. The term for those is ‘sleeping beauties’. In a review paper on the science of science, Clauset et al. (2016, p. 478) say:
A systematic analysis of nearly 25 million publications in the natural and social sciences over the past 100 years found that sleeping beauties occur in all fields of study (9). Examples include a now famous 1935 paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen on quantum mechanics; a 1936 paper by Wenzel on waterproofing materials; and a 1958 paper by Rosenblatt on artificial neural networks.
there are a few outliers that only get widely recognized after decades, much longer than for typical insights
These sleeping beauties might happen more often the younger a field is. In particular, I don’t particularly care that (perhaps lesser) insights are spread quickly once a field is producing a lot of papers.
Anyways, some other examples are Taylor polynomials (!) and various discoveries by Tsiolkovsky on the mechanics of space travel.
As an aside, there are a few papers examining this in the case of academia. One interesting finding is that there are a few outliers that only get widely recognized after decades, much longer than for typical insights. The term for those is ‘sleeping beauties’. In a review paper on the science of science, Clauset et al. (2016, p. 478) say:
The main references appear to be van Raan (2004) and Ke et al. (2015).
These sleeping beauties might happen more often the younger a field is. In particular, I don’t particularly care that (perhaps lesser) insights are spread quickly once a field is producing a lot of papers.
Anyways, some other examples are Taylor polynomials (!) and various discoveries by Tsiolkovsky on the mechanics of space travel.