This link is sympathetic to Bretz’s skeptics:

http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/t_origins/bretz_re.html

Several examples of this are present in the relatively recent history of science. For example:the theory of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener and supported by Alexander Du Toit and Arthur Holmes but soundly rejected by most geologists until indisputable evidence and an acceptable mechanism was presented after 50 years of rejection.
the theory of symbiogenesis presented by Lynn Margulis and initially rejected by biologists but now generally accepted.
the theory of punctuated equilibria proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge which is still debated but becoming more accepted in evolutionary theory.
the theory of prions — proteinaceous infectious particles causing transmissible spongiform encephalopathy diseases — proposed by Stanley B. Prusiner and at first rejected (because pathogenicity was believed to depend on nucleic acids), now widely accepted due to accumulating evidence.
the theory of heliobacter pylori as the cause of stomach ulcers. This theory was first postulated in 1982 by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. However, it was widely rejected by the medical community believing that no bacterium could survive for long in the acidic environment of the stomach. Marshall demonstrated his findings by drinking a brew of the bacteria and consequently developing ulcers. In 2005, Warren and Marshall were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on H. pylori

In 1875, German scientists found spiral bacteria in the lining of the human stomach; the bacteria could not be grown in culture and the results were eventually forgotten.

“…the neglected genius whose ideas are rejected with incomprehension by the scientific establishment during his life, because they are simply Too Far Ahead Of His Time to be grasped by lesser mortals, only for the scientific community to rediscover these insights decades later. This sort of thing… simply doesn’t happen all that often in real life….”

Not “all that often”, perhaps, but too often.

In astronomy, the proponents of the heliocentric model come to mind—not only Copernicus and Galileo among others during the Renaissance, but also Aristarchus of Samos about two millennia earlier.

In the biological sciences, take for examples the neglected genetic studies of Gregor Mendel, and the ridiculed contagion/hygiene ideas of the heartbroken Ignaz Semmelweis, both in the 19th century.

Granted, these were too early to be “Nobel Prize Winners”.

Wasn’t there a mathematician who took delight in publishing his discoveries in the most obscure mathematical journals he could find?

And then there’s how stuff gets written. Witten’s articles are a delight to read; undoubtedly one reason why his ideas in superstring theory spread so quickly at the beginning of the field. Then there are other scientists (I’m sure we all have our own examples to fume about) who link obscure and dense thickets of turgid prose with indecipherable mathematics.

This is not a very good point, and I should probably drop it unless someone comes along to support me.

Might you be thinking of 18th Century British opposition to Continental calculus, based on the fact that the latter gave at least some credit to Leibniz and used his notation instead of Newton’s?

Very little of Prigogine’s book was about his own original work. It was mostly a history of thermodynamics and related questions.

I do remember reading that calculus was resisted at Oxford and Cambridge as late as 1800, but I can’t document that.

Poincare’s case is quite different from Onsager. Poincare was known to be a very clear and good expositor of his work. On the other hand, this was not true of Onsager. Also, I dont think Onsager ever worried about the lack of recognition that his ideas received. It is also true that for most people, poorly written stuff gets ignored more often than not. I think though, that for people like Onsager, a lot more benefit of the doubt would be given even today, (in my opinion deservedly so) since a person with the depth of insight he had, is hard to find.

Science has a policy, and I think most scientists would agree that it is a fine policy, that if you come up with some fantastic idea, but refuse to publish it, then you’re not going to get much sympathy, in your lifetime or afterwards, when this effect/theorem/discovery is named after someone else who also wins the Nobel Prize. Science does not have a similar stated policy when it comes to comprehensibility. There is, to some extent, an informal such policy, in that if no-one can understand you they’ll just ignore you, but it’s not something that is drilled into young scientists; that it is YOUR responsibility to make your ideas clear to others, not their responsibility to try to figure out what you are talking about. As science grows ever larger and ever more complex, I think it is time for all scientists to be much more explicit and much more ruthless on this point.

Prigogine is much murkier, since its harder for an outsider to separate out his ideas from others. He also proposed a specific narrow research program that has not been particularly successful. There is also reputedly a cult of personality around him that as far as I know does not exist for Mandelbrot.

I think it’s true that the significance of Poincare’s work was not fully appreciated by physicists at the time, and that the main conclusion they drew was just that the n-body problem was not analytically solvable. It was certainly understood by mathematicians in the relevant fields, though, and there was much subsequent work. From their point of view, I can see how irritating it would be for people to tell them they didn’t know something they knew for years. At the same time, mathematicians are in general terrible popularizers, so it’s not surprising that they had never managed to get the message out.

Mathematicians never thought calculus itself was an engineer’s kludge. The modern era of mathematics practically begins with calculus, and the use of intuitive but non-rigorous arguments didn’t really end until the turn of the century, at which point calculus was already on a firm footing. There were certain further developments, such as the Heaviside calculus and Green’s functions that mathematicians thought were kludges, but that’s a lot more specialized.