[jessriedel]

There's lots of things under the physics umbrella out there, and the Nobel committee has refrained for giving a prize for string theory or other speculative BSM physics for decades; there's no reason to think they'll change, especially given the recent downturn in the popularity of those fields. The Nobel isn't restricted to fundamental physics. You can look at the awards from the recent years to get a sense of what gets honored when there are no fundamental advances: laser spectroscopy, magnetoresistance, optical fibers, semiconductors, graphene, etc.

[L_Rahman]

The graphene one still rubs everyone in the materials science community the wrong way. I haven't had a single professor bring it up in class without snorting derisively at the fact that the guys who discovered won a Nobel.

This means they're either really smart people who saw something the rest of the community didn't or lucked into something that they might not actually deserve. I'm not sure yet which is true.