Revert to the original plan for cathedral
Among the millions of people positioning themselves to view yesterday’s total solar eclipse across North America, a group of researchers had a bigger mission in mind than simply experiencing totality, writes Kasha Patel, from a small town in Mexico.
In September 2017 the Synod of the Diocese of Christchurch voted to restore Christchurch cathedral in three parts. First the cathedral itself, second the tower and third the ancillary buildings.
Each part of the project was only to proceed when the money was in hand. First and foremost was to be the restoration of the main cathedral space. Instead of this Christ Church Cathedral Reinstatement Limited has developed a cathedral precinct, which was not the brief from the synod.
So It is hardly surprising the budget has blown out to the point where the project is in danger of being permanently stalled.
I have heard the arguments from the church about how an $8 million building called the cathedral centre is absolutely necessary so parishioners can have a cup of tea after church. I find that facile and ridiculous.
As to the tower, that can be the concern of our children’s children. The argument from the church is that the revenue from the tower is needed. My argument is how many tower passes need to be sold to recover the money invested to build the tower?
I think the project should proceed without the tower and the cathedral centre and that would reduce the budget somewhat. It was to be expected that over the course of time there would be some budgetary increase. But if those in charge of the project had stuck to the road map they were given by the synod in 2017, we would not be in the mess we are in today. This is an unmitigated disaster.
Tilly Flood, Merivale
Old and new
I don’t know why former Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker’s idea, at the time of the earthquakes, to preserve/stabilise the cathedral ruins and build a contemporary glass replacement around it, didn’t gain any traction. This has been done before in the UK.
What a poignant reminder of the old and new… the old being visible through the new. So symbolic, and would have cost so much less than replacement and would be well up and running now. What a significant monument it would be, telling the historical story.
Why remove what has happened completely? I did not see any responses to Parker’s suggestion in The Press ,but there must have been? I thought it was brilliant. I so wish I’d responded at the time with what I passionately agreed with, and regret my silence.
If only this could be done now. Lorraine Sutherland, Christchurch Central
Restoration savings
The cathedral restorers could save $50$70 million by not putting the cathedral on isolators.
I have been told that the Church Property Trustees are insisting on this.
That is absurd, since unless they have a monstrous raft foundation like an underground car park, the foundations for the isolators will sink; the liquefaction made far more critical by Ecan allowing the Convention Centre and library to use the underground aquifers for heating.
Isolators need above and below foundations. The Arts Centre has forgone this and the church should also. Richard Owen, Christchurch Central
Understand its history
A rap over the knuckles for the Cathedral rebuild naysayers who might not understand the history and value of the cathedral to the Canterbury community and to the nation.
If they read Bishop McKenzie’s history of the cathedral published in 1931, they will see that similar problems arose with costs etc and it took some 30 years for the cathedral’s virtual completion in 1881.
The current situation has supplied considerable employment and will continue to do so. Having had five generations association with the cathedral, commencing with the first City Missioner from 1899 and with gentlemen of the choir and choristers etc, I look forward to its completion.
Far too many historic buildings were condemned after the earthquake and it is important that the best of what is left is retained. If we lose part of our history we lose part of ourselves. More culturally aware countries like France understand the value of their historic buildings, such as Notre Dame, and funding is found when repairs or rebuilds are required. Peter Chapman, Warkworth
Not fair it’s going
Almost 47 years to the day (April 7, 1977) since it started, Fair Go, one of the highest-rating TVNZ programmes, has been axed.
In the meantime New Zealanders continue to have their intelligence insulted by Seven Sharp, which has to be one of the worst “current affairs” programmes on the planet and one I try to avoid by stacking the dishwasher between 7pm and 7.30pm.
This restructure typifies the rationale of corporate executives who reside in their ivory towers and then wonder why staff morale plummets and the company staff questionnaires rank them so lowly.
Red Sapwell, Amberley
Eclipsed again
Unfortunately, another shadow is likely to sweep across the USA in November if Trump succeeds in eclipsing Biden to Make America Grey Again. Chris Botur, Hillmorton
Second Ashburton bridge
There is no doubt that this project will add resilience to the district, and the region. However it won’t ease traffic around the CBD unless the new route is also redesignated as SH1. The community’s shops and facilities close to the existing highway aren’t moving any time soon after all, and freight would be able to shift off the existing road and closer to the Caltex truckstop.
Another solution worth advocating for is a bus service like Timaru’s MyWay, which would particularly benefit those on a low income and/or unable to drive due to age or physical disability. Fewer vehicles, less noise, and cleaner air might also encourage people who live within walking or cycling distance to leave their vehicles at home. (Hint: submit on ECan’s LTP today!)
Lastly, has anyone noticed that there’s a rail track through the middle of Ashburton too? A little more investment there perhaps, for passengers as well as freight. Imagine all those containers, commuters, uni students, concertgoers and tourists travelling between Dunedin and Christchurch by train rather than by road.
Yes, this might take years to come to fruition. All the more reason to start work now.
Sophie McInnes, Rolleston
Western bias
Your weekend editorial on Israel/Gaza (A turning point in Gaza, April 6) highlights the problems Palestinians face in having their rights acknowledged in Western media outlets.
There is no mention of the 76 years of brutal oppression and massacres, discrimination and apartheid faced by Palestinians at the hands of Israel.
As your editorial points out the huge Gaza death toll is of “faceless, nameless” Palestinians and the reason for that is because they are not humanised in Western media. Instead they are described as “militants”, “terrorists”, “extremists” – labels given by Israel and duly reported as such to us.
The almost total dominance of Israeli spokespeople, Israeli justifications and Israeli stories in our media is one important reason the issue has not been resolved and Israel carries on wreaking havoc on Palestinians without consequence for its myriad war crimes. John Minto, National Chair, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa
Look out for O-pressletsextra-10, an extra online file of letters on the Christ Church Cathedral reinstatement saga, at our masthead site, thepress.co.nz.
Three hours before the total solar eclipse, the sky over El Salto in Mexico had only a few wispy clouds. “It looks good,” said Toby Dittrich, a physics professor at Portland Community College.
For him, the eclipse wasn’t about the pictures of an occulted sun – although that was enough for millions of other eclipse viewers to gather under its path from Mazatlán, Mexico, to Canada.
For the professor, it was about using the rare celestial phenomenon to understand our universe like never before.
Dittrich and a group of students travelled to Mexico to run one of the most famous astronomical experiments in history – one that proved Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
It showed how our massive sun bends starlight around it, showing that spacetime must be curved instead of flat as Isaac Newton had predicted. Since the experiment was performed with rudimentary instruments in 1919, however, scientists have run only a limited number of loose follow-on tests.
Dittrich wasn’t satisfied with that situation.
“No-one really believes that [Einstein’s theory] isn’t true because of theoretical calculations,” he said. “But no-one has actually satisfactorily proven it.”
So instead of heading to sought-after eclipse-viewing destinations such as Mazatlán or Austin, Texas, Dittrich and a group of fellow physics professors, amateur astronomers and undergraduate students travelled more than 2000 miles (3200km) to the outskirts of El Salto, Durango, a small mountainous town in north-central Mexico.
This remote area lies at the centre of the eclipse shadow, providing four minutes and 30 seconds of totality - the maximum time that anyone would experience during Monday’s eclipse (Tuesday NZT).
The hope was that the location might also shed unprecedented data that would verify Einstein’s mathematical model without a doubt.
105 years before this eclipse
The journey of Dittrich’s 2024 experiment began more than a century ago. A 36-yearold Einstein, yet to reach major stardom, published a radical new idea in 1915 on how gravity worked.
Previously, Newton had proposed that gravity occurred in a flat, uniform space. But in Einstein’s universe, space and time (which are inextricably linked together) are curved, getting pushed, pulled, stretched and warped by matter.
“If you get really close to really massive things, things get weird,” said Daniel Borrero Echeverry, a physics professor at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, who also travelled to El Salto.
Einstein did the maths to prove his theory, but he also suggested that one way of measuring it in the real world would be by recording the position of the stars close to the sun when the sun is out, and compare it to when it is absent.
It’s difficult to image stars in broad daylight because the sun washes them out, though - unless a total solar eclipse blocks the sun’s surface, allowing scientists to see details along its outer edge.
Einstein’s general relativity theory predicted that the sun should bend the light of surrounding stars by about twice as much as predicted per Newton’s theory - a change too small to detect with the human eye but potentially visible with telescopes at that time.
Enter British astronomers Sir Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson. In 1919, they hauled their instruments from Britain to northern Brazil and West Africa to measure starlight during a total solar eclipse.
They captured a total of 14 stars that showed the light deflection that Einstein
predicted, although the margin of error was large. Nonetheless, they proclaimed that Einstein was correct, launching the physicist into the mainstream celebrity status that we know today. “EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS,” the New York Times wrote on its front page.
Ahead of this eclipse, Dittrich, Borrero Echeverry and a handful of student and faculty researchers geared up to redo the 1919 Eddington experiment in unmatched detail with better ground telescopes and thousands of sky images. They specifically set out to measure stars extremely close to the sun’s edge – the “forbidden zone”, where they often get washed out by the bright sunlight.
Seven years to the eclipse
This is no easy experiment. Over the years, several research teams have tried to re-create it, but they have either failed, produced margins of error that were too large, or failed to capture enough data.
Dittrich and fellow physicist Richard Berry tried in August 2017, but it’s not something Dittrich really brags about. While the data set was good, the calibration of his telescopes was off. His margin of error ended up to be 50%, more than the original Eddington experiment. He attempted the experiment a second time during a total solar eclipse in Chile in December 2020, but rain and clouds got in the way.
Satellite missions and radio telescopes have made extremely precise measurements of starlight deflection over the past few decades, but none of these expensive projects imaged stars in
Dittrich’s coveted forbidden zone.
The most promising Eddington experiment conducted to date, by physicist and amateur astronomer Don Bruns, managed to capture 40 stars in the forbidden zone during the 2017 eclipse.
Equipped with 13 high-resolution telescopes with cameras deployed across Mexico and Texas, Dittrich’s 2024 team of student and faculty researchers could collect millions of data points that would offer a much sharper picture of this elusive area than ever before: They expected to image 200,000 stars.
It’s like you’re painting a picture of a tree and all you have is a brown trunk, Dittrich explained. More data from the forbidden zone would be like filling in details about that tree’s bark.
Seven days to the eclipse
Travelling in his 1973 Volvo stationwagon, Dittrich hauled a 10-foot (3.05m) trailer carrying about 800 pounds (363kg) of equipment: tools, chairs, tables, laptops, cameras and five telescopes worth a total of US$11,000 (NZ$18,200) in boxes he custom-made.
Crossing the border into Mexico, Dittrich became scared that a federal officer who pulled him over might confiscate all that equipment - after all, the same thing happened to Eddington in 1914 en route to Crimea to conduct his experiment during World War I.
The officer let him through, though not without taking the pesos out of Dittrich’s wallet and a handful of eclipse glasses.
Five days to the eclipse
Once at their destination, an upscale neighbourhood complex about 20 minutes away from El Salto, the team unloaded their boxes.
It took them about five full days at the site to prepare for the few minutes of full totality they would have at their disposal, adding to the months to years of preparation beforehand.
They mounted the telescopes, connected battery packs and upgraded the software to control their instruments and analyse the data. They assembled solar filters made from round cardboard oatmeal containers and galaxy-designed duct tape (totalling less than US$20) to place over the expensive telescopes so the instruments would not fry as they stared at the sun.
Then it was time to work out any kinks before the big show. Telescopes that were supposed to autonomously point to the North Star moved straight to ground: instrument error. Someone bumped a telescope, so it needed to be recalibrated: human error.
If the eclipse was hidden by clouds, that would be an Earth error.
Sixteen hours before the eclipse, all five telescopes were detecting the starlight deflection to an accuracy of 0.05 arcseconds - a promising result that pointed to this being the most accurate Eddington experiment ever conducted.
Then it was a question of waiting until 12.10pm Central time on Monday (7.10am Tuesday NZDT) and hoping that all the preparation would pay off.
– The Washington Post
Ahead of this eclipse, Dittrich, Borrero Echeverry and a handful of student and faculty researchers geared up to redo the 1919 Eddington experiment in unmatched detail with better ground telescopes and thousands of sky images. They specifically set out to measure stars extremely close to the sun’s edge – the “forbidden zone”, where they often get washed out by the bright sunlight.