Well, it's possible to wait 50 years, and still NOT have realized the full impact of your work in society

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

The Higgs boson was first detected in 2012 and he won the Nobel the following year. Saying he waited 50 years for the prize is a bit disingenuous.

Not the poster, but I don't understand the downvotes: this is exactly right. Higgs was awarded the Nobel after the mechanism he theorized was experimentally confirmed, and that is 100% the reason it took so long.

Right! Einstein didn't get the Nobel because the theory of relativity is awesome, he got it after Eddington observed gravitational lensing during an eclipse, confirming a key prediction.

Brilliant theorizing can be both brilliant and wrong.

Einstein got the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum physics, not relativity.

It's not disingenuous, the Higgs mechanism was theorized in the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_the_Higgs_boson