https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-well-deserved-physics-nobel/

Over the past half century, it has been firmly established that our universe expanded over the past 13.8 billion years, emerging from the hot and dense state that we call the big bang. This is an accomplishment of the highest order—on par with those of Galileo or Darwin. A thousand years from now, any descendants we might have will remember the birth of this new science of cosmology.

The remarkable advances in the field of cosmology have been driven by a combination of theoretical and observational work. If you were to judge these developments by the Nobel Prizes they have been awarded, however, you would probably conclude that theoretical physicists didn’t play an important role. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although three Nobels have been awarded for observations related to cosmology (1987, 2006 and 2011), the Nobel Committee has never recognized the work of any of the theorists that built and developed the foundations of the big bang—that is, until this year.