Iteration the Sixth

PUBLISH AND BE DA

Seems a shame, doesn't it? Just when we're getting to know each other, here we are at the very last Snapping Point column. Indeed the very last column of any sort, come to that.

Those of you who keep up with the important news rather than all that fluff about collapsing economies, elections in former colonies and wars here and there, will know where I am heading: The End is Nigh. And it's all the fault of a photographer. On Wednesday, a scientist in Switzerland will press a button that is attached to a camera called the Large Hadron Collider in an attempt to take a snap of something called the Higgs Boson. After a yawn-inducing wait of 0.00000000001 seconds, or just long enough to read the interesting bits in Wayne Rooney?s autobiography, the world will cease to exist.

Photographers are always being blamed for this sort of stuff. Back around 1510 Leonardo Da Vinci took a snap of Jesus, the first known paparazzo shot, the ramifications of which can be read about in Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince's THE TURIN SHROUD: IN WHOSE IMAGE?, (New York, Harper Collins, 1994). Then, in 1826, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, a scientifically-minded gentleman living on his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saone, France, took a picture of his back garden, thus launching an obsession with gardening and lifestyle magazines that is with us still.

More recently, during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Hubble Space Telescope grabbed a shot of an object that is both 13 billion light-years away and also 13 billion years old. This was upsetting to fundamentalists, who insist that nothing is older than 4004 BC. Even more upset were the people who, having paid around $5 billion for the Hubble, found that the picture was of, as reported by the New York Times of April 14th 2000, "a reddish dot."

Personally I would argue that $5 billion for a reddish dot 13 billion light-years distant represents better value for money than $4 million reportedly paid for pictures of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, given that all new babies look like reddish dots.

Of course we cannot be certain that CERN will end life as we know it, or even this column, and you may be assured that, even if it does, the matter will be fully reported in next week's Wells Journal and its associated titles. Nothing as trivial as the destruction of the universe could stop us from going to pr