Calling All Scientist--Explanation Needed

I've been keeping up with the Large Hedron Collider for a while now because, well, I like science. And scientists. Anyway, today was the big day when they finally fired up the big guy and sent a particle screaming through all 17 miles of, uh, tunnel? Machine? Collider? Whatever. It worked! Now we can experiment on particles! We can see how the Big Bang worked! We can create dark matter and black holes! We can test---wait, what?

Last time I checked, black holes weren't a desirable side effect of doing science. We're not talking about Silly Putty here. And dark matter? Are you sure? Really? Let's not forget what happened last time we decided to screw around with particles we didn't understand.

This creates a big dilemma for me. My default setting is "Trust Science. Don't overreact. " I really don't want to be the kind of person who wrote "Here There Be Dragons" on maps and took comet pills. But I'm just not getting this and need someone to explain it to me. That's the problem with having an Art Brain. No matter how much you like science and study it, there's still a chunk of stuff you don't intuit on your own that have to do with details and HOW things work. So, someone with a Science Brain? I would like some answers:

1. Um...why is this a good idea?

2. I mean, if we have no idea what's going to happen when we bash these things together, maybe we should do a little research first?

3. Why is this useful? Don't get me wrong, I'm 1000% in favor of research for the sake of research. You never know what kind of stuff you'll learn. But the way I see it, the programs works like this:

*Spend a kabajagillion dollars on making a ...thing.

* Use kabajagillion dollar thing to do...something.

* You don't know what the something is, but there's a chance it could be really really bad.

What I want to hear is that this is not as stupid an idea as it seems prima fascia. Like I said, I haaaate questioning science. I always expect someone to come up and pat me on the head and tell me not to tax my poor lady brain, why I don't take some nerve tonic and paint a picture about how the scawwy scawwy science makes me feel and let the grown-ups take care of things. I don't even want to make the old "Isn't there a better way to spend (X) dollars?" argument. Because it's Sweden, and they totally have their shit together. They can spend their money on whatever because their people are well taken care of.

So, in short, I just want to understand this whole thing and I need a good scientist to do the 'splainin.