Higgs wrote up his idea in a two-page scientific paper entitled “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons.” It was initially rejected by the major European physics journals, as having no obvious relevance to physics. But then he added a paragraph mentioning a possible observable consequence of his idea and submitted his paper to the American physics journal, Physical Review Letters, where it was published on 19 October 1964. Similar ideas were explored by the physicists Robert Brout and François Englert, and independently by Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble, and these two groups also published their work in the same journal. But, perhaps as a result of that extra paragraph that predicted a physical consequence of his theory, it was Higgs’s name that became associated with the hypothesis, which ended up providing the cornerstone of the successful effort to unify two of the four known forces in nature: the weak and electromagnetic interactions.CERN discovered the Higgs particle in 2012, and he got the Nobel Prize in 2013, and it ruined his life.
Okay, but I do not see why Higgs had to predict the particle, and CERN find it, for him to get the prize.
The Higgs mechanism is essential to the Standard Model, and to all the cutting edge high-energy physics since about 1970.
The other ctitical piece was tHooft's renomalization of gauge theories in about 1970. That made gauge theories the only game in town, with SU(2) for the weak and SU(3) for the strong force. 'tHooft got the Nobel Prize in 1999. He should have also gotten the prize in the 1970s, when experiments confirmed the Standard Model.