EDINBURGH CASTLE

A DARING FEAT OF SCIENCE-AS-MAGIC!

Across Scotland and the UK and around the world, spectators will watch Kevin Quantum live as he attempts to walk unscathed through …nine swinging, burning cannonball pendulums … while blindfolded… against the clock… Walking through the randomly swinging cannonballs looks impossible. Yet there is a sweet-spot, a moment when the harmonics align and a person can pass through the flaming pendulums unharmed. This walk of faith is analogous to our transition out of lockdown, made possible through our scientists’ conviction and our people’s courage.
Together we will bear witness to the easing of lockdown and re-establish our hopes for the future, for the revival of tourism, and in one another.
In the shadow of the giant, historic Mons Meg cannon, Kevin – blindfolded – will calculate the moment of harmonic alignment and synchronise his walk through danger. He aims to emerge, without being struck, to the sound of the one o’clock gun.

A WORLD-WIDE LIVE EVENT!

Thousands connected digitally as it streamed at 12.50pm, free and live on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for people in Scotland and around the world.
Anyone living within a two-mile radius of the castle could connect physically with the event as they watched online and simultaneously heard the cannon fire at one o’clock.
The recorded event remains on YouTube and other social media for the audience and news media to share.

THE GUN AND THE PENDULUM
The traditional one o’clock firing of the Edinburgh Castle cannon began in 1861 – a roar of sound that could be heard far away in the Leith
Docks, so that ship captains could set their chronometers.
Little did they know that the sound took ten seconds to travel from the Castle to Leith!
Ernst Mach, the physicist who gave his name to the “speed of sound” is doubly connected to this courageous feat of science and magic – because Mach also created the Harmonic Pendulum, a beautiful, hypnotic visualisation of harmony. Kevin Quantum’s steel, rope and burning cannonball gauntlet was inspired by the string and-bobs Harmonic Pendulum which Mach built in Prague in 1867, just six years after the first ever one o’clock gun firing.

SCONE PALLACE