Good story. I was at CERN while the LHC was under construction. The experimental scientists I met there were all as you describe. Their single-minded determination to be as cautious and precise as possible with their experiments, never overstating a result or over-simplifying an explanation, made them almost impossible to understand at times. But this was truly a scientific community working with common purpose and at the very edge of our scientific knowledge.
Aside from this, it's a great day for woefully underfunded British science, and for Peter Higgs in particular. We spend 0.55 of GDP on scientific research - less than any country in the G8. Yet Britain is the most scientifically productive country in the world. (The Cavendish Lab in Cambridge alone has 29 Nobel prizes - more than entire countries like China or Russia.) Knighthoods won't mean a damn if Higgs isn't awarded one.