It's all in the ether, you shouldn't sniff that stuff.

@Mike

There is no such thing as pointless research when it is based on trying to understand the fundamental laws of the universe. Notice the special word there - fundamental. Are you serious suggesting that at any point in the future, pushing our understanding of nature further into the darkness of ignorance will not produce enormous direct benefits, not to mention the indirect benefits already mentioned (www & Blue Gene etc)? The historical evidence suggests you are wrong. There is no guarantee that track record will continue, but I'd suggest the time to change plan is after it has failed, not whilst it still has a 100% success rate.

To take your second slightly random point - lack of symmetry proves only lack of symmetry. It is not up to Scientists, particle physicists or otherwise to prove the (non) existence of 'god' - which is why they tend to assume non existence (along with santa, fairies, and guardian angels) on a daily basis, regardless of religious convictions, and look for real reasons. As you say their job is to find out 'why', and this experiment helps to answer some of that question - or at least helps frame the question itself.

@Captain DaFt, @Mark Pipes and others

As I understand it the reason that CP violation is important, rather than just regarded as an inconvenient observation relates to a combination of statistics and inflation - we have a very 'smooth' universe with very regular averages for all sorts of distributions, for things that are far enough apart that information can never have reached from one part to another within the life of the universe, so to close this gap 'inflation' is posited to have grown the universe quite a lot in it's very early age (first few seconds I think), thus averaging stuff out quite finely. As a result of this if there were equal amounts of matter and anti matter in the early universe (or the potential for each), it's distribution would also be averaged so that we should see equal amounts of each. Since we don't, there has always been violation of that particular symmetry. Of course it could be we were in a particularly lumpy, matter biaised part of the very early universe - but that would make our section of the universe (the bit we can see) very very special, and if your theory relies on our experience being very very special it is less likely to be correct.

Happily not being any sort of scientist, I can avoid the shame of ACing. Which means the real scientists can flame me for being retarded. But they can't wear a name badge whilst doing it. Oh the irony.