Research topics that gain importance quickly For instance, there's currently a great deal of attention towards the theory of "spin glasses" in probability theory.  But how does a research direction gain its importance so quickly?  Does it simply start with one researcher who declares that this research direction should be given a lot of attention?
In my (limited) experience in academia, I've noticed that the research topics that gain the most importance &amp; attention tend to be the ones that impact the most people.

Sometimes (often) it takes a while for new research to become important. For example, in my field of computer engineering, machine learning has been researched for decades. But only in the last 5-10 years has it truly caught fire, as computational power, software libraries, etc. finally reached the point where the average researcher could quickly and easily make use of machine learning techniques. Now, you see its use in everything from engineering to the social sciences because of its power in extracting useful information from large datasets.

Sometimes new research topics become important because they disrupt a large amount of research. Einstein's theory of special relativity (eventually) opened up vast new fields of research -- but not before facing criticism from classical physicists who saw their life work as being under attack.