YOU'RE SITTING on Concorde, zooming comfortably over the Atlantic at Mach 2, sipping your free glass of champagne. Feeling smug? Little do you know that a few kilometres down, under the sea, a slim, grey, pencil-shaped vessel is overtaking you. Yes, it's a supersonic submarine.
Actually, this vehicle is still a fiction, but the technology that could produce it is real enough. At least one Russian submarine is armed with torpedoes that exploit it. The same idea is being used to make guns for destroying underwater mines, and it could double the speed of surface vehicles such as hydrofoils. Most remarkably, it could produce an underwater vessel capable of travelling at thousands of kilometres an hour while remaining almost entirely dry. For the key to this technology lies in that glass of champagne-and in particular, the humble bubble.
Like a lot of other bizarre ideas, the supersonic sub came out ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.