The world-destroying LHC has been shutdown after a large helium leak on Friday. The two-month hiatus isn’t just to fix the leak, but rather raise the selections temperature from near absolute zero to human survivable temps. Doesn’t this call into question the safety and reliability of the multi-billion dollar project though. The LHC fired up on September 10 for its first experiments and then was quickly shut down due to a faulty transformer a few hours later; now this? Maybe the soothsayers were right and this 25-year project in the making isn’t meant to find the god particle. I’m not saying I want to utter, “told ya so” after there is gaping black-hole where the Alps used to be, but what else can go wrong? At least we have two months before they fire up the Death Star beam again.
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Matt Burns is a longtime technology journalist, now Chief Content Officer at Insight Media Group and formerly Managing Editor at TechCrunch. At Insight Media Group, he guides coverage and editorial across fast-growing tech publications of The New Stack, Towards Data Science and Roadmap.sh. Before that, he spent 15+ years at TechCrunch, rising from contributor to Managing Editor, helping scale the newsroom and program Disrupt’s stages and TechCrunch’s other events. Earlier, he also wrote for Engadget. Matt co-founded the Resilience Conference, an event series at the intersection of defense, security, and startup innovation. Across roles, he’s reported on and moderated conversations in AI, mobility, frontier tech, and the hard problems technology companies face. He’s interviewed world leaders, top investors, startup founders, and public-company CEOs. Lifelong Michiganian with plenty of Silicon Valley miles, he brings Midwest empathy and an editor’s eye. Offstage, he works with teams to sharpen narrative and validate go-to-market plans, and, when possible, camping along Lake Michigan.
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