Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics
than alchemy or theology.... Because biographies of famous scientists
tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk
they were willing to take.... Physics seems to us a promising thing to
work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes of time. But that's
because we know how things turned out. In Newton's day the three
problems seemed roughly equally promising. No one knew yet what the
payoff would be for inventing what we now call physics; if they had,
more people would have been working on it. Newton made three bets. One
of them worked. But they were all risky.
-- Paul Graham.
"The Risk of Discovery" (January 2017).
http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html