In theory, the first scientist to synthesize metallic hydrogen will slingshot to the forefront of the rocket fuel revolution. Silvera claims the high-energy substance will “revolutionize rocketry” and admits that NASA provides some of his funding for that reason. It’s unlikely that the Princeton University theoretical physicists Eugene Wigner and Hillard Bell Huntington — who in 1935 published a seminal study predicting that hydrogen, which phase-shifts in almost countless ways, could be arranged to form a metallic lattice — thought their paper would start a race of this intensity.
