You'll find this cache on the Union Canal, not far from Hermiston.
You will have to be discreet as it is on a busy path. The easiest
place to park is on Cultins Road at N 55 55.303 W003 18.141 (Grid
NT 1871 7060). But first a little bit of history on the location
that you are visiting.
Over one hundred and fifty years ago, while conducting
experiments to determine the most efficient design for canal boats,
a young Scottish engineer named John Scott Russell (1808-1882) made
a remarkable scientific discovery. As he described it in his
"Report on Waves".
``I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn
along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly
stopped - not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put
in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state
of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled
forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary
elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which
continued its course along the channel apparently without change of
form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and
overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles
an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a
foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually
diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the
windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my
first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon
which I have called the Wave of Translation''.
This event took place on the Union Canal at Hermiston, very
close to the Riccarton campus of Heriot-Watt University,
Edinburgh.
Throughout his life Russell remained convinced that his solitary
wave (the ``Wave of Translation'') was of fundamental importance,
but ninteenth and early twentieth century scientists thought
otherwise. His fame has rested on other achievements. To mention
some of his many and varied activities, he developed the "wave
line" system of hull construction which revolutionized ninteenth
century naval architecture, and was awarded the gold medal of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1837. He began steam carriage service
between Glasgow and Paisley in 1834, and made one of the first
experimental observations of the "Doppler shift" of sound frequency
as a train passes. He reorganized the Royal Society of Arts,
founded the Institution of Naval Architects and in 1849 was elected
Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He designed (with Brunel)
the "Great Eastern" and built it; he designed the Vienna Rotunda
and helped to design Britain's first armoured warship (the
"Warrior"). He developed a curriculum for technical education in
Britain, and it has recently become known that he attempted to
negotiate peace during the American Civil War.
It was not until the mid 1960's when applied scientists began to
use modern digital computers to study nonlinear wave propagation
that the soundness of Russell's early ideas began to be
appreciated. He viewed the solitary wave as a self-sufficient
dynamic entity, a "thing" displaying many properties of a particle.
From the modern perspective it is used as a constructive element to
formulate the complex dynamical behaviour of wave systems
throughout science: from hydrodynamics to nonlinear optics, from
plasmas to shock waves, from tornados to the Great Red Spot of
Jupiter, from the elementary particles of matter to the elementary
particles of thought.
Down to the cache:
The container is a 35mm film canister (no surprise there then?).
Although there is a stub of a pencil inside the container you are
advised to bring your own. Please be carefull if it is windy, as
you will see it is easy for the container or contents to get blown
away. Also please be discreet whilst retrieving and replacing the
cache, cyclists will appear without warning.