The truth is that, with some exceptions, these sorts of things are generally given as a sort of lifetime achievement award. Higgs and Englert have done quite a bit of important work beyond just proposing this particle. The same cannot yet be said of those who found it. Everybody always knew what had to be done to discover it. We only had to wait for politics and technology to come together to reach a high enough energy. Envisioning the thing 50 years before reaching such an energy was even imaginable is quite a feat. And it wasnât the only one in their careers.
Experimentalists tend to win Nobels when they either cleverly collect the data necessary to decide a knotty problem or discover and explain a phenomenon that no one expected to see.
