In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.
It depends on why I want to re-prove it. If I'm transported in a time machine back to, say, 1905, and want to demonstrate the existence of the atomic nucleus, then sure, I know how to run Rutherford's experiment, and I think I could derive enough basic scattering theory to demonstrate that the result isn't compatible with the mass being spread out through the whole atom. Even if I forgot that the nucleus exists, but remembered that the question of the mass distribution internal to an atom is an interesting one, the same applies. But to re-derive that the question is interesting, that would be tough. I think similar comments apply to most of the Standard Model: I am more or less aware of the basic experiments that demonstrated the existence of the quarks and whatnot, although in some cases the engineering would be a much bigger challenge than Rutherford's tabletop setup. Getting the math would be much harder; I don't think I have enough mathematical intuition to rederive quantum field theory. In fact I haven't thought about renormalisation since I forgot all about it after the exam, so absent gods forbid I should have to shake the infinities out. I think my role would be to describe and run the experiments, and let the theorists come up with the math.