well the thing is, science is a slow process. You can't flip a switch and have explosive science just happen.
On 10 September 2008, the proton beams were successfully circulated in the main ring of the LHC for the first time, but 9 days later operations were halted due to a serious fault. On 20 November 2009 they were successfully circulated again with the first recorded proton?proton collisions occurring 3 days later at the injection energy of 450 GeV per beam. After the 2009 winter shutdown, the LHC was restarted and the beam was ramped up to 3.5 TeV per beam (half its designed energy).On 30 March 2010, the first planned collisions took place between two 3.5 TeV beams, a new world record for the highest-energy man-made particle collisions. The LHC will continue to operate at half energy until the end of 2012; it will not run at full energy (7 TeV per beam) until 2014.
The other thing is, to the layman, the stuff questions they're trying to answer would seem incredibly dull and having no effect on your life.
Is the Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses via electroweak symmetry breaking actually realised in nature? It is expected that the collider will either demonstrate or rule out the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, thereby allowing physicists to determine whether the Standard Model or its Higgsless model alternatives are more likely to be correct.
Is supersymmetry, an extension of the Standard Model and Poincaré symmetry, realised in nature, implying that all known particles have supersymmetric partners?
Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models based on string theory, and can we detect them?
What is the nature of the dark matter that appears to account for 23% of the mass of the universe?
It is already known that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are just different manifestations of a single force called the electroweak force. The LHC may clarify whether the electroweak force and the strong nuclear force are similarly just different manifestations of one universal unified force, as predicted by various Grand Unification Theories.
Why is the fourth fundamental force (gravity) so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces? See also Hierarchy problem.
Are there additional sources of quark flavour mixing, beyond those already predicted within the Standard Model?
Why are there apparent violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter? See also CP violation.
What are the nature and properties of quark-gluon plasma, believed to have existed in the early universe and in certain compact and strange astronomical objects today? This will be investigated by heavy ion collisions in ALICE.
People don't care unless idiots on tv tell them that it's going to destroy the world
