I have been hearing over the last few weeks that they may or may not receive the Nobel Prize for physics this year. It became official that Peter Higgs Francois Englert received the prize earlier today. There was some contention that they may not win this year, but in a couple years when the god particle discovery made last year was more firm and the implications were better known. My guess is that because of the age of Peter Higgs (84 years old) that there was some pressure to grant the prize sooner rather than later.
The amazing fact is that the Higgs and Englert made the conjecture about the god particle 50 years ago. Back then, they were criticized for a “way out there idea” that could “never be proven true or false in our lifetimes”. We see many of the same reactions about physics theories today that seem crazy (this means you: string theory, many parts of Quantum mechanics, negative energy, one-electron universe, etc.), but may be proven true within the next 50 years by experiment.
There is still much to learn about the god particle and the discovery has led to many more questions about how many different god particles exist and the impact on helping to figure out what dark energy and dark matter is. I have recently talked to two theoretical physicists who have already used the new knowledge of the god particle energies to extrapolate that some particles we believed had zero mass, may actually have mass, which goes a long way in answering the dark matter and energy questions.