Can a theoretical physicist win a Nobel Prize anymore? The background: The big news in the science world this week is that, on Thursday, it will be officially announced that LIGO has detected gravitational waves. Some people have even started talking about a Nobel Prize. I agree that this is a momentous accomplishment and these people deserve all the nerd glory the world has to offer; that said, I feel that, in a fair world, this Nobel Prize should be shared between LIGO and (posthumously) Albert Einstein. After all, he is the one that came up with the theory of physics that predicts things like gravitational waves. 

The observation: Nobel Prizes can't be awarded to deceased individuals; the Nobel Committee doesn't award Prizes for theoretical work before its predictions are experimentally confirmed; and theoretical physics is churning out ideas that can't be directly tested with today's technology and resources. Put these factors together, and  I have this uneasy feeling that  Englert and Higgs might have been the last theorists to receive a Nobel Prize. It really looks like Stephen Hawking and Ed Witten, which are widely recognized as among the best theoretical physicists ever, will never get one. For practical purposes, the Nobel Prize in Physics has become the Nobel Prize in Engineering Physics. 

The question: are there any theoretical physicists that are young enough, their work groundbreaking enough, and the testing technology sufficiently within our current reach, that a Nobel Prize could reasonably be awarded to them?
We've now seen three Nobel prizes in physics awarded since the posting of this question (February 2016), and I think it's fair to say that the answer has proven to be an unequivocal 'yes'. So far, four out of nine physics Nobel laureates have been theorists.

The 2016 prize was awarded to three condensed matter theorists (Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz) "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter". The 2017 prize was awarded to Weiss, Barish, and Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." Of these, Kip Thorne is very much a theorist, known for his work in relativity and astrophysics, and for being one of the authors of that one thick book with an apple on the cover.