Recently physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world's most powerful particle accelerator, located near Geneva at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) — announced that the celebrated discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson was indeed the Higgs boson.
Now, the standard model of particle physics is complete, except for one important thing: black holes.
Four years ago, doomsayers forecast that the LHC would produce microscopic black holes that would swallow the Earth in a matter of months. The latter-day Nostradamuses provoked widespread fear, not to mention lawsuits, about high-energy particle physics experiments.