Don't stop thinking about tomorrow: it'll soon be here. (Environmental Policies).(Brief Article)

As John Fetters points out in his article on fuel cells in this issue (page 10), Jules Verne's idea of extracting energy from water must have seemed straight out of science fiction when he suggested it in 1870.

But it wasn't merely a product of his imagination. Sir William Grove, a London professor of physics, understood that sending an electric current through water splits the water into its component parts of hydrogen and oxygen. Would reversing the process produce electricity and water? Thirty-one years before Verne's statement, Sir Grove tried it and became, not Frankenstein, but the father of the fuel cell, although that term wasn't coined for another fifty years.

Since then, the public's fascination with outlandish and fabulous predictions hasn't waned. One recent energy-related tale that, like Verne's earlier prognostications, has a basis in fact is a somewhat silly film called "Chain Reaction," starring Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman (1996). The suspicion that this is a traditional Hollywood potboiler that might play fast and loose with those facts is reinforced by the number of explosions, gun battles, and, especially, a clear tank filled with roiling water that predictably begins to shake violently--a Hollywood cliche for visually telegraphing catastrophe.

Now, the studio says the film centers on the "theft of an incredible new technology which could change the world's reliance on fossil fuels." Quite a contemporary theme, we must say. Some reviewers have interpreted the process as nuclear fusion. But, really, the gist of the experiment is to produce hydrogen from water using a method of producing significant amounts of energy from a mysterious process.

Contemporary or not, the characters are just following the lead of Sir William Grove and Jules Verne. They're after a clean, cheap source of hydrogen, although the mysterious power source muddies the waters with other possibilities.

Esoteric Science

Besides, the idea of hydrogen conversion is as old as Jules Verne, so a bit of the aforementioned esoteric science, which involves the conversion of sound energy to light energy, is added to enliven the plot. The process, sonoluminescence, concentrates energy--according to the American Institute of Physics-- by a factor of more than a trillion. The resulting light flashes, 50 trillionths of a second or shorter, generate local temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun.