Is it fair to give the Nobel prize to a single/two persons in 2015? Usually it is a team of people all working together collectively to solve a common problem.
Btw, my contribution was in the front end particle detectors, when I was an undergraduate student. This was 20 yrs ago so a bit fuzzy on he details. But basically, people on my team (University of Pennsylvania high energy physics dept) designed analog ASIC's that effectively connected directly to the SNO photomultiplier tube outputs to process the tiny electrical signals, IIRC often from only a few hundred or thousand electrons. There were two chips they designed. An integrator (SNOINT) which was like a preamp and identified how strong the signal was, and a discriminator (SNOD) which identified accurate timing information of the pulses.
We required IIRC about 10,000 of these chips, and the fabrication process had a very low yield (about 30% had all functionality working). So my job entailed setting up an automated test station, simulating all functionality of the photomultiplier inputs, and interfacing with a computer to run the suite of tests and identify good/bad in about 30-60s. We had a good process and hired a bunch of part-time workers who would run through the tests to identify the good chips.
I was quite jealous of some of my colleagues who worked with the actual production circuit boards, and got to travel to SNO itself and go down into the mine to set them up in production.
Fun times though. We also built Fermilab and CERN detector electronics, and even for the cancelled superconducting supercollider. That job basically taught me electronics and data acquisition, and led to my next job as a joint hardware/software engineer.
The key is to combine the vision part with the ability to manage and motivate the team.
I used to work on an extremely similar experiment to SNO and Super-K. I played a small but key role in getting the thing to work at all. (I like to think things went a lot smoother with me helping out than they would have with someone else doing my job, but you never can tell, can you?)
Did this year's Prize recipients contribute more to science than the people at the bottom of the ladder? I don't know, I didn't work on those experiments. I also know that you should not under-value leadership. On the experiment I worked on (and now you see why I'm not naming it), one of the top people -- one of the candidates for any major awards or prizes -- was a total and complete fool and roadblock, in the classic style of legendarily terrible senior managers. Yet he has received a lion's share of the credit for this mismanagement. (To be fair, there were plenty of other top people who were good at their jobs.)
My direct supervisor on this project seemed to deal with this by wanting his fingers in as many pies as possible. I can only explain his behavior by speculating that he really, really wanted a Nobel Prize. But he will almost certainly never win one. To get a Prize in experimental particle physics these days, you must be a senior member of an experiment, and you must be very, very lucky that your experiment turns out to be Prize-worthy. This guy seemed to want to be involved in as many experiments as he could so that one of them would work out. But that meant he had little attention for each project, could not rise to the top levels of any of them, and generally never made as much total impact as if he'd concentrated on just getting one thing right. If our hunches were correct, and his life goal really is a Nobel Prize, it's kind of sad to think this talented scientist is on a life course that will only distract him with mirages, never bringing him towards his real goal.
In any case, the hundreds of us working on the experiment knew that we would never receive any high-level acknowledgements of our work, no matter how important our contributions were to the project. And that, I think, was a small but meaningful contributor to why I left science for engineering. (More importantly, I found while working on the project that I preferred engineering and am personally more fulfilled, as well as better paid, this way, but observations like that aren't going to improve modern science.)