John Hopkins was at a cocktail party chatting with a fellow physicist about electric guns when he had a crazy idea: a massive, kilometer-long cannon powered by hydrogen, submerged below the surface of the ocean.
It was at a cocktail party that Dr. John Hopkins, a fast-talking 54-year-old physicist who once worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, had a crazy idea.
As sometimes happens over a third martini, a colleague suggested that gas-powered guns are much more powerful than conventional guns: When ignited, a gas gun can shoot a projectile at insane speeds of over 11 kilometers per second -- or roughly 25,000 miles per hour.
And that got Hopkins to thinking . . .
What if he could build a massive, 1-kilometer-long cannon powered by hydrogen that could be housed below the surface of the ocean? The sort of device Jules Verne wrote about in 1865 in his novel "From the Earth to the Moon"?
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Author: John Brandon
