In high school chemistry and 1st-semester quantum mechanics we all learn that “1s” is the ground state of a hydrogen atom. Wake up sheeple! A few brave souls have argued that hydrogen has a lower-energy state than 1s. According to some, it’s a whopping 500keV lower! These alleged lower-energy states are called “deep Dirac levels” or “hydrino” states.

My assessment? The ground state is 1s. The textbooks are correct. Boring but true.

This post, like the previous two posts, has nothing to teach us about cold fusion, except that this is a dead-end to avoid. But it’s still an interesting story about what can go wrong when solving differential equations.

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Randell L. Mills is the founder of Brilliant Light Power (previously called BlackLight Power), a company trying to generate useful energy by catalyzing transitions of hydrogen into the “hydrino state”, i.e. an alleged state of hydrogen with a lower energy than the 1s state. The existence of this state is justified by Mills early on in his 1800-page tome, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics. The book throws out quantum mechanics on the first page, and proceeds to purportedly derive all of physics and chemistry from a classical foundation. TL;DR – everything in the book is nonsense as far as I see. I expect that this is glaringly obvious to physicist readers but I have written this post anyway for the benefit of non-scientists.

(There have been other arguments by other people besides Mills that a “hydrino state” exists. These arguments are also wrong but for more interesting and substantive reasons. See the next post.)
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