Why do they have to delay the LHC restart up so much, anyway?

They have to cool the magnet system again to 1.9K, which will take several months. By the way, it seems they also want to check whether there are anything else wrong.

Everyone is eagerly awaiting the discovery of the Kibble boson (known colloquially as “The Dog Particle”), which was missed at the Fermi National Labrador. There have been speculations that it is too light to observe with available accelerators because it is really a gallstone boson, but such claims are unfunded.

By the way I like the anti-spam mangling of your email address on your web page. I once asked someone to quote my email address with the word “ecoli” inserted, with a note “please remove the anti-spam germ for a faster response”. This elicited the comment “astrobiology gone mad”. Hmph!

It depends on the cause of the non-detection. If, as I assume you mean, there is not a
detection where theory clearly indicates there should be, then of course the non-detection
of gravitational waves would be the MUCH bigger earthquake. We have ABSOLUTELY NO
REASON to believe the GR is not perfectly correct in the non-quantum regime. Thus, not
finding gravitational waves would be a BIG surprise. The Higgs, on the other hand,
is on much shakier ground. There isn’t even a clear prediction of the mass, and we are
all sure that if it is not found where expected, then the next theory—which will sound
just as plausible—will easily account for this.