[Nateman]

...Once the lower energy hydrogen is produced, being highly reactive....

This is where the logic all brakes down. Lower energy states are not "reactive". They are stable.A car high on a hill will coast downhill quite naturally. Once it reaches it's low energy state at the bottom of the hill it's not going to become "reactive" and roll uphill to the top again!

[grey_whiskers]

Incidentally, since atomic hydrogen has as its ground state, electrons in a 1s configuration (spherically symmetric) the only way I can think of to lower the energy would be to move the electron's probability distribution closer to the nucleus -- which would tend to make it less reactive.

But I wasn't even clear from the article whether they had atomic or molecular hydrogen in mind....

My gut feeling is that this is the chemical equivalent of Microsoft Vista. More genius from the subcontinent.

Cheers!

[TheTopRead]

That’s a flawed analogy Nateman. Using that same logic, you could also argue that ordinary hydrogen, in what you think is the lowest ground state, cannot share its electron and, thus, combine with other elements to form compounds. But, of course, it can and so too can a hydrogen atom in a lower energy state.