Gravity is something we take for granted; it’s what literally keeps our feet on the ground. But what if, gradually, it started to disappear? What if one moment a five-pound note could levitate, the next a human? That was the starting point for Kevin Quantum when he began creating his latest magic show, Anti-Gravity. ‘This new cutting-edge science was talking about anti-matter, anti-gravity and the reverse of what we have in our day-to-day world,’ former physicist Quantum says over Zoom. ‘Gravity makes an object fall down but anti-gravity makes the same object fall up, which is theoretically true.’

For the production’s first outing, Quantum set out to build an ‘anti-gravity machine’ that grew stronger as the show progressed. It was, he says bluntly, a ‘frivolous, light-hearted show’ in which increasingly heavy objects were lifted into the air. But as Quantum (also known by his real surname, McMahon) delved deeper into the subject, his ideas matured.

He found himself wondering what happens to the brain when the body is sent into space. While research shows that astronauts’ muscles atrophy if not worked rigorously, Quantum is interested in what occurs inside their heads: ‘what happens to your blood cells or your brain molecules when there’s no gravity there to hold them down?’ Science has always informed Quantum’s interactions with magic. He was still a physics PhD student in 2005 when he trained with Penn And Teller as part of Channel 4’s Faking It. His previous show Momentum culminated in a flaming Newton’s Cradle. But science does have its limitations, he says, when it comes to being comfortable with the notion of wonder. 

‘I sometimes get frustrated with the way wonder is treated with so little respect in education. Like a science communicator will often say “hey, look at this really cool thing that looks like magic; but no, look, it’s science”. And they show you how it works, and instantly take away that moment someone should have to think about it and consider it and chew it over.’

Quantum believes magic has the power to fill the space between wonder and explanation. ‘I think if you constantly show someone something, and then give them the secret straight away, you’re standing on a lot of the things that make it interesting.’

Magic and wonder, however, can only go so far when it comes to the physical practicalities in some of his anti-gravitational tricks. ‘There’s this really annoying thing I’ll let you in on,’ he confides. ‘For me to be able to levitate at the end of the show, I need to be below a certain weight.’ Of course he won’t say how it’s done. ‘But I have to be below 88 kilograms. I know... it’s a weird number. Like Back To The Future.’

Kevin Quantum: Anti-Gravity, Gilded Balloon Patter House, 31 July–26 August, 2.30pm.