To be fair, the exact quote may have been "an act of nature that we'll never fully understand." Whatever. Let's just break the whole thing down, here. An "act of nature" is what, exactly? Unless we're going with some anthropomorphic Gaea / Nature God thing, an "act of nature" is a natural phenomenon or, in other words, something that happens. On the "never understand" / "never fully understand" dichotomy, I would suggest that, arguably, we'll never fully understand anything. Some things we can understand fairly well, some of them we understand a little, some we don't understand at all. So let's just drop the weasel word and keep it at "never understand."

Great. So why did the bees die and (spoiler) zookeepers start feeding themselves to lions one limb at a time?

Well, it's just something that happened that we'll never understand.

Hmmm... So -- assuming for a moment that there are some -- how do we identify the things that we'll "never understand?" Wouldn't a couple of days (or even years) after such a "happening" be premature for saying that we'll never understand a thing? Maybe we would want to, I don't know, really try to understand a thing before putting it into that category? And shouldn't science teachers and scientists be the Very Last People ever to put something into that category?

I'm probably making more of this than I should. After all, it became clear that science wasn't M. Night's strong suit when he gave us aliens capable of interstellar travel who couldn't figure out not to land on a planet (spoiler) two-thirds of the surface of which is covered by a deadly poison.

Still, I find this notion of things we don't understand intriguing.

Case in point: we are now just a little over a year away from the scheduled opening of Blacklight Power's first power plant. For those not familiar, this startup energy firm is a little on the controversial side:

Imagine being able to convert water into a boundless source of cheap energy. That's what BlackLight Power, a 25-employee firm in Cranbury, N.J., says it can do. The only problem: Most scientists say that company's technology violates the basic laws of physics.

Company founder Randall Mills claims that his fuel cells turn water into an exotic form of hydrogen called the "hydrino." A hydrino is a hydrogen atom whose electron is placed in an orbit lower than what quantum physics would describe as the ground state of hydrogen. In the process of converting regular hydrogen atoms into hydrinos, the difference in energy states is expressed in the form of heat, which of course can change water into steam, which will then turn a turbine, and voila! -- cheap limitless power faster than you can say "cold fusion."

The big problem with this idea is that it violates the central tenant of quantum mechanics. * The whole deal with quanta is that they're supposed to be indivisible. So an electron can be in position 1 or 2 or 3, but it can't be in position 1.5 because there is literally no such place. With these hydrinos, the electrons are parked neatly in something like position .75 or .9 or something. I don't know the actual number, but if it's not an integer -- and it's not -- then any respectable physicist will tell you that it's not a "real" quantum state, and that we needn't bother with anyone inclined to think that it is. To quote one such respectable scientist:

"He's wrong in so many ways, it's beyond counting," says Robert Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland and former spokesman for the American Physics Society. Parks, 77, uses BlackLight as an example of phony physics in his 2002 book, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. He says of Mills, "I don't know of a single scientist of any reputation who takes his claims seriously."

Ouch. That would seem to sew the whole matter up, wouldn't it? Well, yes, except for the fact that Mills' fuel cells really do seem to be doing something. Enter another respectable scientist and let the plot thicken:

In 2005, leaders at Greenpeace asked Randy Booker, chair of the physics department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, to fly to New Jersey to investigate BlackLight's claims. Booker says he was skeptical at the outset, but during his visit, "I found that they really were producing a great deal of excess energy with hydrogen," he says. "Some people may disagree with the theory, but the experiments work."

If Booker is right, imagine the world we'll be living in a few years from now in which thousands or possibly millions of people will be powering their homes via a process that virtually any scientist you asked today would tell you is flat-out impossible. Awesome!

Should that come to pass, we will see one or both of the following:

Scientists will acknowledge that Mills is correct and will concede that we didn't understand quantum physics as well as we thought we did.

Scientists will continue to refute Mills' quantum claims, offering alternative explanations as to how his fuel cells produce power, and explaining that we need to better understand how they operate.

So, yes, we will have identified a major gap in our understanding. But I bet nobody tries to make the case that either quantum physics or what Mill is doing should be classified as "something we'll never understand."

Call it a hunch.

* Or possibly it doesn't. Brian Wang, who has been tracking this story pretty closely, says that there might not be a problem here.