That quote isn't real; it was a metaphor Rutherford purportedly once used, posthumously recalled by John Bernal. It was incorrectly converted into a direct quot

That quote isn't real; it was a metaphor Rutherford purportedly once used, posthumously recalled by John Bernal. It was incorrectly converted into a direct quotation by later writers. But even then, you're misunderstanding the quote, by which is meant that physics has supremacy and all other sciences are collecting specific instances of physics; the LHC is decidedly doing physics. However, even if you take the quote to mean what you imagined, it is unnecessarily cynical. LHC has advanced our understanding of physics.