Solid, Liquid, Gas, And… A Fourth Phase of Water?!

with 🎙️ Gerald Pollack, Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Founding Editor-in-Chief of the WATER research journal, Executive Director of the Institute for Venture Science, and Author of – among other books – “The Fourth Phase of Water.”   

💧 The 4th Phase of Water, or Exclusion Water, is a semi-liquid or crystalline state of water that forms at the interface with hydrophilic surfaces. More on that in a second!

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What we covered:

🍏 How there’s a fourth phase of Water, beyond solid, liquid and gas 

🌱 Where the 4th phase of Water forms, and how

🧮 How Light may be creating the Exclusion Zone Water (or EZ Water)

🧮 How the Fourth phase of Water bears a negative charge and thus may enable… a Water Battery!

🍏 How the 4th Phase of Water can be leveraged in the Water Industry

🍏 How the formation of EZ Water bears a surprising resemblance to the first step of Photosynthesis

📜 How Gerald Pollack’s work follows in the steps of Boris Derjaguin’s discovery of “Polywater”

😲 How Water is a surprisingly low investigated field of fundamental science (despite many water questions being still open)

🤔 How “Fourth Phase Water” somehow barely isn’t Water anymore, and could have been called “semi-liquid” or “crystalline water”

🍏 How like-charged particles may well attract each other without breaking any law of fundamental physics

🍎 How “EZ Water” opens the door to discuss esoteric water topics like the theories of Viktor Schauberger and Rudolf Steiner

🍏 How many known everyday phenomenons may be better explained through the lens of “EZ Water”

🧮 Challenging prestigious names and theories, advocating for a “Venture Science” approach to research, discussing the memory of Water, and so much more!

🔥 … and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥 

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Teaser: Fourth Phase of Water

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Resources:

🔗 Check Gerald Pollack’s Website

🔗 Have a Look at the Water Journal

🔗 Visit the Institute for Venture Science

🔗 Plan your next visit to the Water Conference

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Infographic: Fourth Phase of Water

4th-Phase-of-Water-Gerald-Pollack-Infographic

Related Video: EZ Water, the Fourth Phase of Water

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Quotes: 4th Phase of Water

Square-Quotes-Gerald-Pollack-4th-Phase-of-Water

In the Depth of the Fourth Phase of Water

We all know it as a fact: there are three phases of water.

Flowing at the tap or in a river, it’s liquid. If it starts freezing, it gets solid. And if it gets over one hundred degrees, it becomes a gas. So when someone comes and tells us: wait, there’s a fourth phase, you’ll have to admit that it’s a bit surprising to use an understatement.

Yet, if the scientific community doesn’t fully agree with everything Gerald Pollack proposes in his “Fourth Phase of Water” book, they nevertheless all recognize something: there’s more than just solid, liquid, and gas. And that fourth phase exists.

So bear with me; we’ll start by reviewing what that fourth phase actually is, then look at all that it may explain in our daily lives, and finally review how it may be applied in water treatment and the water industry in general.

Part 1: A Fourth Phase of Water?

Have you ever looked at a water pitcher and wondered how water was lying inside? Is it like a bunch of water molecules, just discarded in bulk? Or rather a patient and geometric stacking of molecules on molecules?

I first got to know Gilbert Ling. Twenty-five years ago at a conference to which I was invited. His point of view is that water molecules are not bouncing around fiercely at a huge number of times per second or per femtosecond. They’re ordered, they’re standing at attention like soldiers.

Gerald Pollack

At the time, Gerald Pollack was working on muscle contraction, but the more he was discussing Gilbert Ling’s theory with his students and colleagues, the more he was convinced he should investigate it.

If he’s right, this changes all the biology!

Gerald Pollack

Introducing: Gerald Pollack, the author of “the Fourth Phase of Water”

Oh, by the way, Gerald Pollack leads a laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the WATER research journal, the Executive Director of the Institute for Venture Science and the Author of – among other books – the Fourth Phase of Water.

The thing is that water is a surprisingly low investigated field of fundamental science. Maybe because many think what I thought before jumping into today’s topic: come on, after all these years, we certainly know everything about water, don’t we?

Spoiler, we don’t.

Maybe also because quite recent instances of people trying to revisit what we know of water didn’t end well – think of Derjaguin’s discovery of polywater or Benveniste’s exploration of the memory of water.

Two topics I’d like to cover in the future, drop me a word in the comments if you’d like me to!

Yet, when you think of it, there’s quite a bunch of behaviors of water around us in our daily lives, that we accept as a fact, while hoping that someone understands it.

Do you understand those behaviors of Water?

Why is ice slippery? Why do waves persist over long distances? How do diaper hold 50 times their weight in water? Why does warm water freeze faster than cold water? Why does ice float on water? Why can you build a tiny water bridge between two glasses? Why do droplets of water exist in water?

These are just some of the questions, Gerald Pollack claims he may have answered with the fourth phase of water.

Where does the 4th phase of Water form?

So what is this fourth phase? Well, “what” is maybe not the right question to start with. Indeed, it’s more about where this fourth phase is.

It does form at the surface of water, at the interface, next to hydrophilic surfaces.

Gerald Pollack

Gerald Pollack discovered that when looking at those interfaces, you could notice a particular behavior of water.

It was like, purifying itself from any other compounds than water, excluding all the other molecules.

And that wasn’t all of it.

The water molecules adjacent to that surface undergo a radical transformation. And they transform from the individual water molecules to a sheet like array that has a hexagonal motif to it, consisting of hydrogens and oxygens.

Gerald Pollack

Indeed, we know the water molecule: H2O. In bulk water, it bounces around happily in its typical mickey mouse shape.

But what Gerald’s team found out, is that in those interfaces, it was recombining itself to form H3O2.

How does EZ Water form?

Let me explain you how.

Our water molecules will come together to form a hexagon, with 6 atoms of Oxygen and 6 atoms of Hydrogen. Then, those hexagons will bind themselves with adjacent hexagons, through a shared hydrogen atom, adding 6 half atoms of hydrogen to our structure. Hence the formula: H9O6, which you can simplify in H3O2.

That first molecular layer then serves as a template for the growth of the second layer and so on and so on. And these layers grow one by one. And they can grow to enormous lengths. We’ve seen that grow in certain circumstances up to a meter!

Gerald Pollack

This structure is somewhere in between the vertically stacked-up shape of ice and the loosely connected state of liquid water. Hence the affirmation, that this is indeed the fourth phase of water.

But it still had to get a name to be recognized.

How shall we name the fourth phase of Water?

We called it exclusion zone, a zone that contains this fourth phase of water. And it does exclude almost everything from it because it’s dense, tightly packed kind of entity and almost nothing can get into it.

Gerald Pollack

In retrospect, Gerald Pollack thinks, he may have rather called it “Crystalline Water” or “Semi-liquid Water,” but the name that stuck is “Exclusion Zone Water” – in short, EZ Water.

So by now, we know where to find the EZ Water, and what it is. But the next question in line is: how does it form.

How does EZ Water form?

Gerald’s team actually found it out through serendipity – a fortunate discovery by accident.

We found, or I should say a student who was doing what he was not supposed to be doing.

Gerald Pollack

A post-doctoral student had left the water sample under the microscope in the evening when going home, simply turning down the light.

When he returned the next day, EZ Water had reduced to half the size it was the evening before. But when turning back the microscope’s light, within minutes, it regained its original shape!

He found that the energy comes from light incident lights and particularly infrared light

Gerald Pollack

Infrared light’s incidence on water would trigger a separation of charges, H2O being broken down into H plus and OH minus. Those OH minus then recombine with H2O present in the interface to form H3O2, or as we named it minutes ago, EZ Water.

Does the 4th Phase of Water form like… Photosynthesis?

Now, light inducing a charge separation may make you think of another well-known natural thing: photosynthesis.

I’m not certain, but the process of photosynthesis bears such close resemblance or the first step of photosynthesis. that I can’t help, but wonder whether the two are actually the same!

Gerald Pollack

Even more intriguing: my saying that infrared light triggers separation of charge in water has probably ringed a bell in you. Because, how do you call a body with a separation of charge? Exactly, you got it right: a battery.

The fourth phase of Water has a negative charge

And we’ve demonstrated in the laboratory that starting with this battery, you can actually obtain electrical energy.

Gerald Pollack

Indeed, another feature of EZ Water is that it’s not neutral anymore. It has a negative charge. And the region beyond the EZ layer is positively charged.

We’ve demonstrated in the laboratory that starting with this battery, you can actually obtain electrical energy.

Gerald Pollack

And you’ll see in a minute that this may have direct applications in the water industry.

But first, let’s recap what we’ve learned in this first part:

Summary of this first part:

Principle 1: Water has a Fourth Phase
Principle 2: Water stores energy
Principle 3: Water gets energy from light

The book adds a fourth principle: Like charged entities can attract one another or “Like likes like.” But I won’t be covering that one today, so check my full interview with Gerald Pollack – the link is in the description – if you’d want to know more.

If you need a reason to do so, let me tease you with this: this fourth principle may be the reason why, you’re able to build wet-sand castles with your children to defy waves and tides at the beach.

Are you hooked?

For now, let’s look at how EZ Water may explain many phenomenons we see around us every day.

Part 2: May the Fourth Phase of Water explain many phenomenons around us?

First, if EZ Water is effectively created by the action of infrared light on water, as Gerald’s team demonstrated it, this means that there is EZ almost everywhere.

From the bottom of the oceans, where no visible light passes through, but infrared gets emitted, to the inner part of our bodies, which are made of 99% water molecules.

If you ever type “Fourth Phase of Water” in Google or even Youtube, you’ll swiftly notice that this opens a door to talk about energized water and investigate the theories of Viktor Schauberger or Rudolf Steiner. I won’t do it today, but considering the hype around water ionizers, I’d be keen to dive into it in a future episode – again, tell me in the comments if you’d be interested!

Now, if by now, you’re still wondering if there is one statue Gerald Pollack would still be reluctant to unbolt, consider this.

Let’s question everything!

In his book, he attempts to demonstrate how Brownian Motion – the random motion of particles suspended in a medium – may better be explained through the action of EZ Water than by the traditional theory proposed in 1905.

Who formulated it in 1905, you ask? Albert Einstein!

I was about to meet somebody who was important. It was obviously not Einstein or Archimedes. I’m not that old. I remember that when, uh, uh, w during my first meeting with the late sir, Andrew Huxley and Huxley was one of the grades he passed about, uh, five or six years ago. And he was involved not only with, uh, studies of membranes that won the Nobel prize. I learned from that experience that even famous, uh, really important, important people can be wrong because they’re human. They do sit on toilet seats and eat the same food that we eat, and they have the same foibles that we suffer ourselves and so on.

Gerald Pollack

Hence Gerald’s approach throughout the book, to apply Ockham’s Razor to any phenomenon he attempts to explain.

If you’ve got two competing ideas, like for example, God exists, or God doesn’t exist. Probably the simpler one is going to be the one that is correct. In retrospect, I’d come to realize that in many of those instances, the ideas presented are complicated because they’re wrong.

Gerald Pollack

The 4th Phase of Water as a Hint for further research

Therefore, the book distinguishes the concepts where Gerald’s team is certain – like the existence of EZ Water or the four principles it implies – and the ones which are proposed with reasonable backing, as a hint and support for further research.

And that ranges from discussing what temperature and heat actually are, to studying how vortexes may cool down water, through explaining why various types of water won’t mix, how water-based lubrication works, how water reaches the top of the tallest trees and many, many more.

If you ask me, my favorite one is probably how water bubbles and water droplets may actually be the same:

When you see a structure that is spherical, how do you know what it is? How do you know if it’s a droplet or how do you know if it’s a bubble? how is it possible that you can have a droplet that exists inside of water, it’s water in water!

Gerald Pollack

If you want to better understand what you’re seeing, the next time you boil water in your kitchen, dive into my full interview with Gerald – the link is still in the description!

Yet, if you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in the possible applications of EZ Water in the water industry.

Part 3: The 4th Phase of Water, applied to the Water Industry

In the book, Gerald Pollack tells how his research team experimented around the battery properties of water. He states that “Water acts as a transducer, absorbing one kind of energy and converting it into other kinds.” He also adds that they “were able to extract substantial energy by inserting electrodes into the oppositely charged regions of water – practically as much as the electrical energy used to build those charged zones.”

Hence, it is tempting to see direct uses of water as a battery if it really delivers the high yields Gerald hints to.

That’s why he founded a startup called “fourth phase incorporated” to work on possible applications of his lab’s findings.

But as cool as a water battery may sound, the second hot topic Fourth Phase Incorporated is pursuing is probably even more promising and intriguing for a Water Professional:

If you have an apparatus that can create an EZ, if you put water into this black box and water contains any kind of pollution, including pharmas cast out pharmaceuticals, microplastics, you name it, it’s excluded from the EZ

Gerald Pollack

EZ Water as a Water Treatment

Remember, it’s in the name “Exclusion Zone Water” so it sounds logical that it excludes anything that is not water.

If it can do so, while leveraging renewable energy sources which are widely available on earth, like sunlight in general and infrared in particular, then it may be a cool prospect to treat raw water; be it as a desalination tool, or as a way to produce industrial ultrapure water.

It does work. It works beautifully in the laboratory.

Gerald Pollack

But so far, it only works in the lab.

Funding: The missing Link

It takes an awful lot to cross the so-called valley of death successfully from a laboratory observation, to something that’s usable in a practical sense. And it requires a good deal of investment.

Gerald Pollack

Funding is indeed the last frontier for Gerald and his team. That is why he is advocating for venture science, said differently, to fund research that defies the status quo, taking into account the risk it involves and seizing the potential it may reveal if it was to succeed.

Fourth Phase of Water: Conclusion

But to conclude, let’s take a step back.

First, let me tell you that I am a proud water engineer with a decade of experience in the Water Industry, which gives me some confidence, to review, assess and follow developments in water science, engineering, and applications.

But, I’m by no means a fundamental physicist or chemist. So I’ve been looking around to check what the scientific community thinks of Gerald Pollack’s discoveries, principles, and theories.

It turns out that, for most of what I read, everybody agrees that the fourth phase of water exists. Some argue that, the law of thermodynamics actually say that there are 18 phases of water, but considering that 15 of those phases are solid, I’d see that as splitting hairs.

Reviewing the scientific litterature

Then, when it comes to explain how EZ Water forms, there are theories that compete with Gerald’s light-induced one. To name a few, there is diffusiophoresis, as proposed by Michael Schurr, Casmir-Polder forces as brought forward by Antonella De Ninno, or a brush mechanism proposed by Istvan Huszar.

Who’s wrong, who’s right? I can’t tell. If you know better, come tell me in the comments!

But if you ask me, I find it kind of cool to see people challenging what we think we all know – but we don’t.

I had not played with atoms and molecules since high-school, and I found it refreshing. And think of that: if we had solved all the open challenges and exhausted all the alternatives, would we really still have billions of people without water, 21 years into the 21st century?

I think, that the answer is in the question.

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Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos 🙂

Antoine Walter: Hi, Gerald, welcome to the show.

Gerald Pollack: All right. It’s good to be with you, Antwan. I’m delighted.

Antoine Walter: Well, I can’t tell you how glad and proud I am to speak with you right now, because really, uh, I just finished the second path on your book and that was mind blowing to many extents, which we will be covering and guests in that discussion.

But right before I’d like to start with our good old traditions, which is the postcard. So you are clues to Seattle right now. So what could you tell me about whether the place you are Seattle let’s? I would ignore.

Gerald Pollack: Well, I’m in a place called Bellingham, which is 90 miles north of Seattle. And the reason I’m here is not that I hate Seattle.

I love Seattle. And the problem is that someone discovered that my home in Seattle is full of mold. And mold is not good for promoting health. And so I elected to get the mold remediated and in order to do so, the company says you have to move out. It’s too dangerous to be there as we’re removing the boat.

So a friend of mine owns an apartment or rent an apartment up north at a senior center in a city called Bellingham, which is a very pleasant place, not far from the Canadian border. And I’ve been living here now for five months and I’m hopeful that I can return to Seattle in the next few weeks. And returned to my home.

That would be a thrill, but the home looks as though it’s been decimated by a rocket that was launched and was misdirected towards Seattle, Atlanta to my kitchen. And the kitchen looks as though it’s been exploded. So there’s, there’s a good deal to do. And, um, I’m hopeful that this will get done in the immediate future.

And I can return to my beautiful home overlooking lake Washington and the cascade mountains. It’s really nice. Well,

Antoine Walter: in your book, on the fourth phase of water, they are many experiments, which I could figure out what you doing in the kitchen, which is currently destroyed. These have been in a lab, but there’s a full part where you describe how you boil water.

And I guess that’s the kind of experiment that everyone could be doing in a kitchen. So. In your book. There’s a quote, which to me was the perfect way to open this discussion. You’re writing that discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought and have to tell you before reading your book.

I was absolutely convinced that everything there is to know about water was discovered and known by everyone. And to my surprise, that’s absolutely not the case. So when did you see that there is so much to uncover on water and what makes you think that way?

Gerald Pollack: That’s a really good question. And it happened progressively and gradually, and it happened because of.

Uh, you might say a mentor of mine, although we never worked together. His name is Gilbert link and Gilbert, he passed recently at age, just shy of 100. And, uh, Goldman came from China along with two other scientists. He was in the first cohort of scientists, uh, chosen following world war II to come study in the U S and as you can imagine are a lot of people in China and, uh, those three were chosen.

So those three were among the most promising young scientists. And one of them went on to win a Nobel prize in physics, and we should have won a Nobel prize for his many, many contributions. And I first got to know Gilbert Ling. Twenty-five years ago at a conference to which I was invited. And I came to know him and also a dozen or so people who had evidence to support his points of view.

And his point of view is that water in biology is different from liquid water. We know liquid water very well, but he said, no, no, it’s different inside the cell. In particular, you said the water molecules are not bouncing around fiercely at a huge number of times per second, or per femtosecond. They’re ordered, they’re standing at attention like soldiers that attention and he presented evidence, or he had collected evidence during his lifetime as had other.

To support that cetera point of view. And when I met him after I met him, I was really blown away by what he had presented. I had known vaguely of it earlier, but this really clinched it for me because not just because of the logic and in what he presented and the evidence is supported, but also the evidence from other laboratories supporting that general point of view.

Well, it turns out if we’re right, that Gilbert Lang was not exactly correct in his assertion. I think he was correct in his assertion that the water inside the cell differed in a major way from ordinary liquid water. But I think he was not right in detail. And the book that you mentioned describes the experiments that, that show that it’s a bit different from what Gilbert had suggested.

But when I returned from that conference, after meeting Gilbert link, I gave one of his books, just some of my students to look at. And every one of them came back to me with it, with the same comment. This guy is onto something really important. And if he’s right, this changes all the biology. And as you can imagine, it was really important for me to begin doing experiments, to follow through on what Gilbert was suggesting.

And so that’s how we started. That’s how we got into the study of water. And I, I got to admit to you, um, that shame on me. We had some funding to study muscle contraction, which, which was my previous area of interest. And I, uh, surreptitiously devoted a little bit of that money to study water. Well, of course water has got to be essential in muscles.

So I did nothing seriously. Untoured. But that’s how we got started. So I hope that that answers your question. Yeah, it does

Antoine Walter: actually. There’s another thing, which was very impressive to me in, in your work, which is you are confronting some very famous theories and saying, look, it sounds quite complicated, so maybe it’s not right, which is a bit, and I think you’re giving that example in the book as well, of how, the way the earth revolved around the sun, all of a sudden was much more straightforward than the explanation, which was there before, which involved a lot of calculation.

But what’s surprising in the way you confront those theories, like Brownian motion and things like that is that you’re confronting big names. You’re saying basically, maybe Archie Midis didn’t understand everything about his famous Erika moment and maybe Einstein wasn’t fully, right? How is. As a scientist IQ to confront those superstars of the.

Gerald Pollack: Well superstar. So I, it reminds me of a comment when meeting with superstars, uh, this is a brilliant student who, um, who came to me to give me advice. I was about to meet somebody who was important. It was obviously not Einstein or Archimedes. I’m not that old. However, he said, it’s really simple. You go and you meet them and you look at them and you look at them as though they’re sitting on the toilet and anybody sitting on a toilet, can’t be that important.

And I remember that when, uh, uh, w during my first meeting with the late sir, Andrew Huxley and Huxley was one of the grades he passed about, uh, five or six years ago. And he was involved not only with, uh, studies of membranes that won the Nobel prize, but then he went into muscle, which was my field. And, and I remember I was about to meet him and that, and in a sense, confronted him with three pieces of evidence that we had gathered during the past year.

Each of them. Was squarely against, uh, his just didn’t fit with the predictions of his theory at all. I was a bit nervous, not only about presenting the material, but by meeting this great man who, when he walked into a room, is there was a hush. It was, it was though God had just entered the room. However, I knew previously, not only did our evidence conflict with his theory and I, I believe our evidence, but, but prior to that other people and also presented evidence that simply didn’t fit.

And so I, I felt I was on Terra firma when I approached him, nevertheless, a bit nervous. I learned from that experience that even famous, uh, really important, important people can be wrong because they’re human. They do sit on toilet seats and eat the same food that we eat, and they have the same foibles that we suffer ourselves and so on.

So. In doing science, you know, that the objective is not to pay homage to those famous or important people who have succeeded because they’re human and humans can be wrong on any issue it’s to confront truth, to try to identify truth. And that means it often means starting from fundamentals. And I think, um, uh, sir, William of Ockham had it right now known as his principal Ockham’s razor.

And it was originally a theological argument taken up by Newton and translated into science. And he said, if you’ve got two competing ideas, like for example, God exists, or God doesn’t exist. Probably the simpler one is going to be the one that is correct. And then you can apply that to science. If you’ve got two competing ideas, what is simple?

What is complicated? The simpler one is probably going to be correct. And that, that principle in fact held for, for quite a few centuries and to about a hundred years ago, with the advent of physics and quantum mechanics, which put science into the realm of abstract mathematics and a, you know, a question you might, one might raise is, does mother nature, uh, do her, her work based on abstract mathematics or is it simpler than that?

And I guess I would vote for the simpler of the two options. And so, so this has actually guided my scientific career. I’m looking for elegance and simplicity, and somehow when you’ve identified it, there’s a kind of resonance that comes you, you kind of feel and know that you’re on the right track or you might be on the right track.

And then of course it depends on the evidence and whether the evidence fits your simple idea. I do that. I do that all the time. And I do that with many mechanisms. I used to think when I studied, for example, I studied physiology with medical students at the university of Pennsylvania. Just one of the courses I took very thick book and presented by the experts, some of the experts in the field.

I couldn’t understand so many of those mechanisms. At the time I thought this is a shortcoming on my part. Maybe my brain cells are not quite as functional as those of others. And I talk, well, I, you know, I tried, but I simply can’t understand. In retrospect, I’d come to realize that in many of those instances, the ideas presented are complicated because they’re wrong.

They simply don’t make any sense. And if you try to make sense out of something, that intrinsically doesn’t make sense, you go nuts. And so I hope, I hope that answers your question about challenging authority that has no place in science.

Antoine Walter: Well, I think that’s a very valid point. I hadn’t heard of that. Uh, imaginating people on the toilets in that context, that was usually something you advise to people when they go to a job interview, for instance, but I guess that’s valued for attention as well.

Now I have to think of that. Talking of toilets. That’s not a weird connection and making, but to right before our interview, I was changing the Japer of my daughter. And I was thinking of you and of the book. And it was like, you know, that Japer contains a lot of, let’s say water, rich content. And I have no clue how, and I have no clue why to me, it’s just a fact, it contains a lot of humidity.

And I thought of how you demonstrate in the book that there are many things like that, like surface tension, like, um, uh, why boats leave Stillwater behind them when they pass and in the ocean, for instance, and all these things that you see in your everyday life and that you don’t realize how little we knew about it, and I’m going to be straight to the point.

I mean, the book is called the fourth phase of water. So you explain in the book how that fourth phase of water first. I mean, we know sorted, we know Likud and we know vapor and you say, let’s go beyond. And you discovered what’s you call to us the end of the book, liquid Crystalyn or semi liquid phase of water, which you call in the rest of the book and which has stayed with that name, easy water.

So can you explain what EZ water is,

Gerald Pollack: and easy may, may make no sense in Europe because it stands for exclusion zone and in the U S the Zed is a Z. We say Z. And so, uh, easy is easy to remember. And so it works out very nicely in Europe. It doesn’t work quite as well because, and other places, because it’s easy and.

W, you know, whether, whether you pay attention to that or not it’s exclusion zone. And we, we called it that early on, and perhaps it was an error because exclusion zone actually describes a zone that contains this fourth phase of water. And it does exclude almost everything from it because it’s dense, tightly packed kind of entity and almost nothing can get into it.

And so we started our experiments using microspheres, and we found in these experiments that there was a zone, a region next to a certain surfaces where the microspheres got excluded. And so after a while, instead of going through this, this long description of a phenomenon, we had to give it a name.

Someone suggested to us that we call it exclusion zone because it excludes, it contains a special kind of water that doesn’t admit soluble, et cetera. Ordinary water does add that. Uh, it was an Australian colleague who kindly suggested that and he also suggested it would be easy to remember. And so we adopted it, but it doesn’t describe in a convincing way what, what this water is, is all about because it has the other, besides excluding Sabias and particles extensively, it has other really interesting properties.

And those interesting properties are the ones that together teach us something about, about the water in biology and also outside of biology as well. So that’s where exclusion zone comes from.

Antoine Walter: So that means you take a bulk of. I have here, I’ve played a little bit with them, some water molecules. I mean, the representation, the usual representation of, of water molecules.

So you have these water molecules, you, you just put them in a, in a glass or in units up and whatever you want. And after a certain time, that easy is going to build up. So that means these fourth phase of water is always present as a periphery of liquid water. Is that right?

Gerald Pollack: Yes and no. Um, it does form at the surface of water at the, at the interface, it does tend to form.

So yes, that is one, one feature of the water, the feature that we tend to study, because it happens every time and in an easily easy to measure fashion is next to hydrophilic surfaces. So hydrophilic, water loving, as opposed to hydrophobic water. Like Teflon, for example. But most surfaces are somewhere in between hydrophilic and hydrophobic.

They have a certain, a certain degree of hydrophilicity and those surfaces, not everyone, but so many of them, if you were to immerse a material with that kind of surface into water, what happens is that the water molecules adjacent to that surface undergo a radical transformation. And they transform from the individual water molecules to a sheep like array that has a hexagonal motif to it, consisting of hydrogens and oxygen.

It’s not water anymore. It’s undergone a transformation. And that, that first molecular layer then serves as a template for the growth of the second layer and so on and so on. And these layers grow one by one and they can grow. To enormous lengths. We’ve seen that grow. And in certain circumstances up to a meter, I mean, this is extraordinary by any dimension of any consideration, especially one that is focused on the molecular level.

And that imagine molecules organizing themselves layer by layer out to as much as a meter granted under extraordinary conditions. But typically it will be something like 500 micrometres, half a millimeter or something like that. Or a third of a millimeter, even up to a millimeter. Some ordinary cases so that it undergoes the water undergoes a transformation and a feature of that transformation is that this structure is not neutral anymore.

It has negative charge. And the region beyond this fourth phase, the fourth phase is growing layer by layer. And if you look just beyond it, positive charges are cast out into that region as the, uh, easy or fourth phases forming. So the easiest negatively charged the region beyond this positively charged together.

They’re neutral, but you have a separation of charge which creates a battery. And we’ve demonstrated in the laboratory that starting with this battery, you can actually obtain electrical energy. So that’s one other feature. The third feature I wanted to mention is that this is an order structure of water with battery, like features.

You can’t get that without putting in energy. If you want to create order, you need to put energy. And it’s a fundamental theme of physical chemistry and thermodynamics, and I believe it’s true. It’s not complicated. And also if you want to charge a battery, you need energy to do that too. And so the question has been well, where does this energy come from?

And, uh, we found, or I should say the students found a student who was doing what he was not supposed to be doing. He found that the energy comes from light incident lights and particularly into red light, infrared being far more powerful than any of the other wavelengths. We’ve seen instances where, where there’s a fourth phase or easy.

Water could grow by 10 times, even in the presence of weak infrared light. So infrared is really important and infrared is all over the place. It’s not just coming from your toaster, uh, or your sauna, everything emits infrared. And that’s why if you have a camera with an infrared sensor, even if it’s pitch dark out there, uh, you’ll get a beautiful image because everything is generating infrared.

And that means that the energy for creating this easy is always there. And in terms of biology, you yourself are generating heat and in your, the metabolic processes that are taking place inside your body, and this heat is essentially the same as infrared. And then, so in your body, you have an internal source of infrared, as well as external sources of infrared.

And therefore your body is filled with easy water with fourth phase. So those are some of the properties.

Antoine Walter: There’s a lot to unpack in what you just explained. Let me just go back to what you said that it’s no longer water. It’s just fourth phase and you, you explain this exit going form that it’s taking next to, to the surface.

And then it’s building layer by layer, but in a molecular fashion, molecular description, I mean, water to everyone is age to all, but under your definition, that’s probably the way you say it’s no longer water. What would be the best description is it’s edge three or two? I think that the book is H H 1.5.

Oh,

Gerald Pollack: well, yeah. Or the same is H3O2. Uh, you know, you could multiply by an we’re in to be any number because it’s a vast array, but, but yeah, we, we say H3O2, so. It isn’t really water. And in some sense, calling it fourth phase of water is perhaps erroneous, uh, because you might say it’s not water anymore.

Uh, on the other hand, you know, we think of, for example, of, um, hydronium ions H3O+ plus it’s water together with an extra proton. We still call it the kind of water proteinated water. So we use the term water in a kind of loose sense and, and even evaporating water. Uh, we think of water evaporating, one molecule at a time.

I think that idea is erroneous. And we’ve demonstrated it’s in the book that you mentioned, the fourth phase of water. We’ve demonstrated evidence that what evaporates is not exactly what you think. It’s not one molecule at a time. It evaporates in clusters and these clusters have negative charge. And in addition to that, you have protons that are leaving the water as well.

Um, and these protons are repelling each other. They want to get away from each other and escape into the atmosphere. So, so you don’t really have water. So to speak, that’s evaporating, you have something with negative charge and something with positive charge, both evaporating and both centrally important in weather and understanding.

Antoine Walter: There’s something else that you just mentioned in what I still unpack from your explanation. You said that you have the separation of charges and explain the book, how that resembles the first phase of photosynthesis. It’s somehow that similar mechanism, but if we have a watch of battery that can be charged by lights, that sounds really, really, really promising on one end and too good to be true.

What is it’s as a battery that we’re talking here? Is it a potato battery which can power a clock or is it something which has much more potential in it?

Gerald Pollack: I think the latter, I think it has much more potential in it. So just imagine, uh, you know, mother nature and mother nature was very successful in using light has the energy photons as the energy source in green plants.

And even before that, and in some units out of their organisms, And one day she’s sitting in her easy chair and yawning and thinking I’m getting bored. I want to do something new. And I think that advance animals. And so, you know, animals can move around. They can eat plants, get their energy that way. But, but if you were in mother nature, thinking about inventing animals, would you throw away a mechanism that has been seemingly so successful in so-called lower species, plants and units out of the organism?

Or would you keep it in reserve or keep it in some manner over and above the energy that you could get from food? Uh, you know, the answer to me, it seems pretty obvious that that mother nature, why, why would she throw it away? Why not keep it? And if so, it means that you and I may be getting some of our energy from light and you know, a student of mine right now is undergoing a seven day fast is not eating anything.

He says he’s full of energy. It ends tonight. So if he survives, it will be one week while he’s drinking. And there are other people as documented by, uh, for example, uh, a very nice documentary film. Peter Straub singer produced a few years ago in which he interviews people who don’t eat. And so, you know, if you don’t eat and by the way, this includes a guy from India who, who claims to have eaten nothing for 65 years.

And a group of physicians went on to test him and reported that, you know, his physiology is perfectly normal, except he doesn’t eat at all. And there are many people who do this. And I I’ve been in contact myself with several, including my student is one week, but others for long periods of time. So w where do they get their energy?

And I think it’s possible that they get their energy from the surroundings. And it may be that some of these people are particularly adept at accruing that kind of energy and using that energy. So that’s a, you might say a philosophical point of view about mother nature, but. There’s more. So every cell in your body is filled with easy.

And basically it gets that way because of infrared energy. That’s responsible for building that water out of ordinary liquid water and converting it into, into easy water. And that, that water has negative, as I mentioned before, negative electrical charge. And so your sales, every one of your sales is filled with negatively charged, easy water.

And I would say paranthetically, I think that’s the reason why, if you stick an electrode into a cell, you measure 50 to a hundred millivolts negative, and there were other reasons that are set forth and, and believe. Most everyone. I think that idea is not correct for reasons that are too extensive to go into right here.

But I think the negative electrical potential comes from the negative charge of the easy water. It’s very simple, not complicated. And so this negative charge, you’ve got a sale that’s filled with negative charges. And all I want to do is get away from each other because they repel each other. And that tendency toward getting away from each other, it amounts to potential energy and is energy that the cell can use.

And I think that the cell does use that energy. And this is detailed in my earlier book on water, it was called sales gels and the engines of life. How the water inside the sale plays a central role in practically everything the cell does. That potential energy that’s there is used to propel these processes.

Now, whether it’s the main source of energy or a secondary source, it’s really hard to say at the moment. I should say that though, that some of your listeners who are into biology and such will know about ATP as being the accepted energy source inside the cell. But what people don’t know is is that, uh, one year after that idea came out of a prominent physical chemistry group said, the idea is wrong.

That ATP has this special high energy bond that’s used in all of biology. He said there was, uh, an arithmetic error and that arithmetic error is pointed out by Gilbert link and his writings in his books. And also his website, which I think is still working Gilbert Ling. He talks about it and he mentioned, and I think it’s still true today that nobody has followed up on this challenge.

The challenge is that ATP has no high energy bond. So I’m not sure which argument is correct because, uh, I think I’m not sufficiently adept to evaluate all of those, uh, arithmetic concepts that go into the calculations. I’m leaving it to others, but I just want to point out that the idea that ATP is, is the ultimate source of energy has been challenged.

And whether the challenge is accurate or not accurate, I’m not certain, but the process of photosynthesis bears such close resemblance or the first step of photosynthesis. There was such close resemblance to what we’ve been studying that I can’t help, but wonder whether the two are actually the same, you know, first step is the sale.

The photosynthetic apparatus absorbs light from the environment and then converts water molecules into oh, H minus and H plus, in other words, it breaks up the water molecule into these two fractions. That’s step one of, I think, 20 or so steps. Most of which are not understood. It’s a very long and complex process, but the first step is very simple and it resembles what I’ve been talking about.

So it’s possible that you, your listeners, and maybe even I taking advantage of the energy that come from light in our environment, uh, infrared light specialty, and the infrared light coming from our metabolism.

Antoine Walter: So that is. Application and explanation of what you could be doing with that battery feature of easy water.

I was wondering because there was discussing with BOLO Callahan, which is, um, founder and CEO of BlueTech research, who is looking at some companies in the water sector, which are looking at this easy water and trying to find some technical applications of it. Be it’s as batteries, or as you mentioned, there’s this catalyst aspect also that it may have.

I was wondering how involved are you in that part of the, of the development of your findings?

Gerald Pollack: We formed a startup, a company called fourth phase incorporated, and we were, have been pursuing so far applications and the two applications that we we’ve had in mind, mostly our number one. Uh, I should put this as number two, but.

First is getting electrical energy from light and we’ve demonstrated in the laboratory that we can do it. We can actually light an led by sticking one electrode in the negative, easy, and another electrode in the positive region. Beyond, as I said, it acts like a battery and we use that battery to power, to light a light bulb.

Uh, it works. The problem that yeah, as we have encountered in our startup is that it takes an awful lot to cross the so-called valley of death successfully from a laboratory observation, to something that’s usable in a practical sense. And it requires a good deal of investment. And we’ve been able to obtain a, you know, a rather limited amount thus far.

And the second, which we actually did spend quite a bit of time doing. And ran into some technical difficulties that again require a substantial amount of, uh, development and that isn’t filtration. So I mentioned to you that the easy excludes, practically everything, that’s why it’s called exclusion zone.

And so if you have an apparatus that can create an easy, if you put water into this black box and water contains any kind of pollution, including pharmas cast out pharmaceuticals, microplastics, you name it, it’s excluded from the easy, and in that black box, if you have a way of creating easy and then collecting that easy as distinct from the ordinary water, you should have water that is contaminant free and it does work.

It works beautifully in the laboratory. We developed a system to do that and. And then we’ve been working on a practical way to make it work. It works and we’ve run into technical obstacles because we want it to work every time. And, uh, these technical obstacles have gotten in the way and they still remain to be solved and solving them requires a substantial investment in personnel and, and such in order in order to get it done.

So it’s a real, real challenge. And the real prize, I think comes from that second, that filtration, it’s not just getting rid of pollutants. Uh, there are perhaps other ways to do that, but having our way is need us because there’s no physical filter involved. You don’t have to clean it on a daily basis or replace it or whatever, which is really cumbersome.

So it has distinct advantages in that. It’s so simple in principle, but what we think it can do in the future is as a filter is to filter out the salt. As a sort of contaminant, you might have say from ocean water. And if we can do that, then we obtained drinking water, salt, salt-free drinking water, and it uses only it there’s no physical filter or anything, no energy requiring process, except the energy from the sun, which is used to create the easy water, which should be salt-free.

So we started developing that just a little bit. We haven’t really gotten too far, but I think this is the real prize, you know, because the regions that need, we all need water, it’s becoming so scarce and the regions that need it most, I guess you might say the middle east or north Africa and such, they’ve got lots of sunlight there and lots of water, lots of ocean water.

And right now the countries that are wealthy enough use reverse osmosis, but that’s really costly in terms of. And in this case, you need only the energy from the sun. So these are all really exciting developments, but a big challenge to cross that valley of death from laboratory observation to practical application.

Antoine Walter: Well, that is also a topic where you recall me a discussion with polar Kalon, because he has written a full thesis around the dynamics of water innovation, where he shows how all the discoveries in that field take 30 to 40 years to cross that, that valley of death and to be in the middle of the market.

So I get you, it’s quite a challenge.

Gerald Pollack: It is a challenge. Yeah. What you’re

Antoine Walter: describing here with the potential application, for instance, in this study nation are I could see also, you know, water is on the critical path in applications like microelectronics, where they’re looking for ultra pure water, and basically what you’re doing here.

If it’s water, extruding, everything else, that’s the purest of the ultra pure water. There is. But if I recall, right, you have a pH graduates in what you’re building. Wouldn’t you have a water that might be very pure, but also very aggressive in terms of pH.

Gerald Pollack: I’m not sure what you mean by aggressive in terms of PAG, you mean deviating from what we would call a neutral or normal pH and pH seven.

Yeah. Why would you say, um, a,

Antoine Walter: it might not be the good term, but if I recall, right, the pH is dropping outside of the easy. So I guess the pH is going higher instead of the easy, and you have some gradients which were shown with color grades in the book. So it was wondering if, if that is a permanent feature of easier, if it’s just a transition phase.

Gerald Pollack: Well, yeah, I mean, what you said is accurate as the easy builds, it becomes negative and the region beyond becomes increasingly positive and yeah. Increasingly positive a region. Of course it has low pH because it’s got lots of protons on the other hand, it’s really not so easy to define the pH of be easy because it certainly has negative charge, but pH is defined for liquids.

And this is, it’s not exactly a liquid. It’s more like a gel. And so you can certainly talk about charge that’s contained inside this jail, like water, but more difficult to define it in terms of its pH. So on the other hand, you know, the body maintains this negative charge inside the sound by getting rid of all the complimentary positive charges.

And it does this. So every time you breathe, every time you exhale, you’re breathing water vape. And carbon dioxide. And when you’ve put together water and carbon dioxide, you get carbonic acid and, uh, which has the low pH. So basically you’re, you’re getting rid of positive charges that way. So the body keeps, uh, attempting to expel those positive charges and retain the negative charges.

And that’s why essentially every cell in your body is negatively charged. So you’re a negatively charged as well. We had some preliminary or measurements from students, which indicate that, although. Did reach the stage of being secure enough to be published, but there are pointing certainly in that direction.

And so when you say aggressive, um, with, uh, all kinds of pH gradients and such, I’m not sure whether, whether that’s necessarily the case and I, I guess the main, main reason is is that the negative charge aspect or so what you would call high pH that energy is actually used as we discussed a moment ago.

It’s actually used to power a processes that go on your body and the positive charges, which would give you a low pH are expelled from your body. They’re expelled. It’s not just by respiration, but also for example, if you sweat, the sweat contains positive charges at low pH. When your urinate, the urine usually is pH neutral, too low.

So you could expel positive charges that way, et cetera, et cetera. So the body really tries to get rid of those extreme pH extreme low pH is for perhaps the reason you’re talking to.

Antoine Walter: We’ve been discussing about the prospect of applications of easy. And, and we described, I mean, you described easy water if I may say so quite accurately.

I mean, I think it’s, I hope by now it’s clear to everyone in the book, you have a big part of the book, which is dedicated to showing how applications we all know in the real world might be explained by easy. And sometimes you say it is sometimes it’s you say it’s might, and sometimes you say it could.

So yeah, you have this, uh, very funny graph without on the limb. When you say, Hey, sometimes take it with a pinch of salt and sometimes you have proofs to support the experiments. And I was wondering if you had to pick just three out of those phenomenons that you, you explain through easy, which one would you.

Gerald Pollack: Oh, my goodness. You certainly ask challenging questions. Um, which I appreciate. Oh, uh,

Antoine Walter: uh, I can give you my favorite one if you wish. Oh,

Gerald Pollack: okay. Let’s start with that.

Antoine Walter: My favorite one is your explanation of how a bubble is very similar to a drop and how we shall call them vesicles. And that may be one is creating the other.

And I was like, you know, that was what I was mentioning with the boiling water in the, in the kitchen. At the very beginning, I really did it. I was in front of some water that had pushed to boil and it was like, okay, it’s that thing, which I see every day, every time I’m cooking some pasta. And now that I look at it with a bit more of attention, everything you describe, it makes a lot of sense.

Well,

Gerald Pollack: thank you. You’re very kind to say so, but, but I think that’s a good one to choose. Absolutely. And that may expound just a little, you know, when you see a structure that is spherical, how do you know what it is? How do you know if it’s a droplet or how do you know if it’s a bubble? And we tried early on and sometimes we were quite sure that it was a bubble, turned out to be a droplet and turned out to be an underwater droplet.

And you wonder, well, how is it possible that you can have a droplet that exists inside of water, it’s water in water. And the reason for that is that in order to create something spherical, we showed evidence in the book that it’s got a membrane around it, both of them that bubble. And the droplet and the membrane consistence like onion layers, and each, each layer is a sheet of easy.

And you might have many of these mayors. So the reason you get a sphere to begin with, whether it’s a droplet or a bubble, the reason you get a sphere is that you’ve got water of some sort inside. And that water has got a lot of protons in it. And we demonstrate that has the evidence in the book and those protons are repelling each other.

They, they want to get out and what’s restraining them is a membrane built easy. It’s sort of like a balloon. You know, you, you pump air into it and the balloon expands and what’s keeping it spherical or almost very cool is the resistance of the balloon material. And it’s pretty much the same with the droplets and with the bubbles, the restraint comes from the membrane, which consists of easy.

So now. Why is this important? Why is it significant? And does it extend into other realms? Well, absolutely. And one of those realms is clouds. So we look up at clouds and what are they made of is, uh, well, there are many, many questions on the clouds. The first one is why do they float in the sky? They’re made of water?

You know, if you take a picture of water at the same elevation, if you open the door of your plane and pour the water out, the water comes down in a mass, but the cloud stays up. And so, I mean, that is one reason. And I, I want to answer that unless you ask me in a moment, but I want to get to what is the cloud made of, and you know, it’s not liquid water because we’re liquid water.

You know, it would be just like pouring that liquid water out of the plane. It would come right down and like a waterfall or a bathtub full of water. And it doesn’t do that. So, yeah. And then why on earth? Is it when it rains? How come it rains in droplets? Uh, why isn’t it, why doesn’t the whole cloud descend and inundate you with water?

And the reason has to do with the makeup of the cloud and the cloud is actually made up. It’s not a liquid, it’s not a gas it’s actually it’s, I don’t know if you’d call it a undefined kind of structure, but it’s a suspension of little droplets. And each of those droplets is the same as the droplets that we were talking about, whether they’re bubbles or droplets, they all have these easy membranes and these easy, as I mentioned before, negatively charged.

And it turns out for reasons I discussed in the book that each droplet has a net negative charge. No. If you think about, so we’re back again to why this is important, the droplets versus the bubbles and in conjunction with that, the existence of an easy membrane. So you’ve got these negatively charged droplets and you think at first, well, they’re all negatively charged.

If you buy my argument evidence of which is presented in the book. If you buy the argument, they should repel each other and the cloud should quickly dissipate, but it doesn’t do that. Why not? Well, the answer and in a sense, this comes from the great physicist Richard Fineman. The reason is that you’ve got two droplets and if you have the negatively charged, they should repel each other.

But if you have a positive charge in between, then you’ve got two forces, you’ve got the repulsive force of these droplets that are repelling each other, want to get away from each other and you have an attractive force of this positive charge in between. That’s actually polling on those flanking droplets and wants to pull it all together.

So when you have a balance of these two forces, the repulsive force and the attractive force, it remains stable. And so clouds are, you know, moderately stable. You’d look up to the cloud and it’s of course, undergoes dynamic changes, but they’re rather so changes. And all of this has to do, if you get down to the basics with the structure of individual droplets and bubbles, which are in fact what’s the same.

So that’s, um, I think a good example of a phenomenon that has wide application.

Antoine Walter: It is what you call your fourth principle. If I recall, right? The like likes like

Gerald Pollack: exactly like likes, like so, so fine men in his own. Inevitable way. He said like likes, like because of an intermediate of unlike. So, you know, it’s just a beautiful way of describing the phenomenon that I had just told you about.

You have an intermediate of unlike charges that is the positive one in the center. And two of these droplets that contain like charges. So like likes, like, it means that the two droplets want to come together because of an intermediate of unlike the, the positive charges that lie in between those two negatives and it becomes stable.

So I think that was actually part of Fireman’s Nobel lecture. If I, if I remember correctly and you know, it, it appears as a whole chapter pretty much in, in five minutes, classic book lecture, three books and lectures and physics highly recommend. I’d like

Antoine Walter: to step. I think we decide from easy water to cover, to swiftly cover.

I don’t want to sidetrack you too much, but it really intrigued me and appealed to my curiosity. You were mentioning two debacles that you call like that in the book, the poly water topic and the memory of water topic. And I wasn’t sure about the conclusion because you, you present the cases you show, how if I got it right.

How dare you again, with the poly water wasn’t that far from, from showing the same that you showed with easy, because the reputation was a bit, I mean, what you demonstrate is that poly water was discarded because the water wasn’t pure, fully pure. And what you’re showing is that if it had been pure, the effect would have been even stronger.

Correct. So if I got your rights, you validate the poly water. Thankfully somehow dirty again, couldn’t prove his point. And that way you are the one writing the fourth phase of water. And not him. You’re not saying that I’m saying that I’m not one to put words in your mouth, but on the memory of water, I couldn’t get your, your

Gerald Pollack: conclusion.

Well, yeah, the memory, let me, let me talk about that when poly water. Yeah, I, I can’t prove, but I do think that what Dario was onto is similar to what we observed, maybe the same phenomenon observed using in different ways. And, and I also know that, uh, although Darien was quote, proved wrong, you know, very famous, their most famous physical chemist in all of Russia.

And in theory, it was claimed that he was wrong and he’s the one. Who, uh, apparently sealed his coffin with nails by expressing his view that all the critics were correct. And as it turned out, I I’ve had private conversations with two people independently, two people who knew him very well. And who said that?

He actually, until the day he died, he knew that he was correct. He believed he was correct. And what you might surmise from that is that he was under pressure from the Soviets to declare that he screwed up. It was not the Soviet system of science, which would be embarrassing for the regime. But he specifically, he was the guy who screwed up because his water was contaminated.

And yes, we found that if we use pure water, we see an easy phenomenon beautifully. And if we add contaminants, we still see it, but maybe not as strongly or as clearly, but definitely there. So the argument is erroneous. I think now Benveniste is, is more interesting. I don’t want to go into every detail of what he did, but he had.

Uh, scientists or rather, you know, conventional scientists who became very famous. Uh, and some of the stuff that he produced is in every microbiology book. So, and they went back to France. He started somewhat in the us, and he had a laboratory of something like 50 people, a very major scientist. And someone came to his lab and said, Hey, you know, when these experiments that you’re doing, you put some substance on to cells and the sales secrete another substance.

You said the antibodies that you, you exposed to the cells, you said I can dilute them and dilute them and dilute them so many times and still get the same highly specific result. And, you know, Jacques who I, I knew reasonably well, he passed about six or seven years ago. You said, uh, I impossible that that can’t be, but he invited being an intellectual scientist, curious.

He invited this guy, he sat in the corner of my laboratory and it’s free. Why don’t you demonstrate what you can do? And he did it. It was kind of like, like a homeopathic procedure, dilute and shake, dilute and shake and shake. And you can dilute to the point where statistically speaking, there should be nothing left, but water.

And then it turns out that if you take this quote water unquote and pour it on the cells, they did exactly the same thing as what happened with the undiluted is a, an and of course, this seems preposterous to the world and especially to the editor of the journal nature, who, um, um, it’s another story. I kind of interesting story, but let me just come to the bottom line.

So Ben Venus was shamed by this, this editor who sent a delegation to the laboratory to. At what they were doing and the delegation of peers, so to speak, uh, consisted of the editor himself, who was a physicist, not a biologist. This is biological experiments, the amazing Randy, uh, magician famous, famous for determining the tricks of magicians, other magicians, and a guy named Walter Stewart from the national institutes of health, who was a fraud Buster, so that they surmise that this must be some kind of fraud.

And they sent this delegation. There were not exactly peers to the laboratory. And even though in two, out of three attempts, they demonstrated that the phenomenon really worked as they had reported. And one time it didn’t work. So to speak was when one of the committee members did the dilutions himself.

And so they drew the conclusion they huddled and I drew the conclusion. Since the French seem to get it to work all the time, but the visitor couldn’t get it to work. It must be a track. And the world’s greatest magician maintains it was a Trek, but couldn’t figure out the nature of the trick, which is kind of interesting.

So, um, Ben for this, essentially, it was the end of his career being shamed by these people who, who wrote essentially an editorial in nature saying the whole thing is a trick and it was because of sloppiness or poor note taking or something like this. And then within the year, several people claimed to have demonstrated that they couldn’t reproduce it, reproduce the phenomenon.

And that was published also in, in nature. And the objection to that is they actually didn’t follow his protocol, pay Pablo their own protocols. And therefore, if they got a negative result, it didn’t prove that Vanessa was wrong. It just proved that whatever protocol they used, I didn’t work in the same way.

But since then, Ben Venus has been confirmed in many laboratories and in our water conference, which we organize each year, I do the scientific organization. We invite speakers at that conference. It, Ben Venus is a hero. And the reason it a hero is because the people at the conference know that his work has been reproduced many times, including presentations at that conference.

And one, one paper is by a group they published together. The first author is Ballone B E L O N. I think he’s Spanish. He or she, I, I, I can’t recall in which a consortium of laboratories throughout Europe, some of them skeptical, repeated the experiments exactly as Ben Venus did. And they reported together that, uh, I believe it was five out of six of them, uh, could reproduce what he and his group claimed.

And by the way, when they claimed it, they said, even for them, it doesn’t work every time, but it works so much of the time that easily it’s statistically significant. Although they couldn’t identify the reasons why occasionally it wouldn’t work. So I mean that in a quick summary, essentially, that’s the story of jock Ben Venus.

So those two are, you might say debacle that took place because of serious consequences. In the first case, it might have meant, uh, you know, If there are, y’all getting hadn’t cooperated. It might’ve meant that he’d wind up in Siberia somewhere in a work camp. And in the case of Ben, Vanessa, it’s just that it sounded a whole idea of sounded preposterous.

So preposterous that the editor of nature couldn’t imagine that it could conceivably be true. And the reason let me just conclude by, because you’ve got other questions by, by saying that the reason is that they thought of water as being independent molecules bouncing around randomly. At a fierce number of times each second or each, you know, as I said, femtosecond, and there’s no way that a substance like that could retain memory or information, which is really what Ben Venice was talking about.

Memory of what the water had seen before it was diluted. However, they didn’t know about it, easy water and easy waters, like a crystal and crystals are like Silicon crystals are used in computer memories and they indeed can store information. And so if, um, if the water that we’re talking about is easy water, and there’s a reason to believe that, uh, that that’s the case, they absolutely do have the capacity.

I mean, the easy water being a liquid crystal, pretty much like a Silicon crystal in many ways does have the capacity to store information. And now at that same water conference, water information and water is a given. I can say everybody who attends the conference is in agreement, but pretty much so, as far as I can see.

So those are really interesting stories. They have humanistic aspects to them, which I think we don’t have time to go into, but I do detail them to some extent in the book.

Antoine Walter: Well, that leads me to my opening question to close, which is kind of ironic, which is you will have, aside from your activity is on the easy water itself.

You have created the Institute for venture science and what you described right now with those two outliers. I mean, clearly what you described with, with Ben venues is to me a note, Larry, he himself couldn’t believe it to be true before he tested it and found out it was. And that’s what. Understanding of what you intend to achieve with your Institute for venture science.

It’s like, even if it’s against the OD, if it has the chance to be transformational, let’s, let’s test it out. And let’s try to do research on those topics, which might not be within the usual spheres of classical research to understand why you’re right with that approach, what you intends to do with this

Gerald Pollack: venture science.

Yes. Uh, yeah. Okay. This is a good question. I’m glad you asked, because we’re really excited about, about this Institute. And so yeah, the purpose of the Institute is to provide funding from private sources and, uh, to fund scientists, uh, who, who are addressing issues that, that may run against the mainstream.

Why do we need this? Well, uh, we needed. Unlike technologies that that are disruptive and challenge the mainstream and could be supported by investors. If you’re, if you’ve got a scientific topic, a fundamental science with no obvious practical application, but really important. Ultimately every new finding produces applications that you could never have conceived earlier.

So unconventional science is absolutely critical, but scientists don’t have much of a chance to pursue them. And the reason, the reason is that they need money to do it. Any scientist working in a laboratory, you need to equip the laboratory. You need to pay for the people who are actually doing the experiments in their laboratory, and it’s not cheap.

And especially at universities, generally the universities contribute zero. They expect you to bring in money from the outside. So the difficulty with bringing money in from the outside can be exemplified by, by me. Let me give you an example. You Antwan you have an idea you’re maybe not, I’m not sure your background, but perhaps you’re not a professional scientist working at a universal.

I’m a humble engineer. Uh, well, I started in engineering too, and I don’t know humble. Maybe. I don’t know. Some people say so, but I can’t judge that. So we’re perhaps in the same boat, but you Antwan have an idea and it runs against mainstream thinking. And then your idea, uh, the, the one I always like to present, because it’s so convenient, your idea is that the earth is round, but everybody around you knows that the earth is flat because all you need to do is look out the window and it kind of looks flat out there.

You know, you don’t see much in the way of curvature and everybody believes that it’s common knowledge that the earth is flat. And you’re, you’re thinking, wait a second, something’s wrong here because, um, you know, I’ve seen satellite pictures. And each time I look, I see the earth is curved. It looks, looks round, looks like a sphere.

And so, you know, the prevailing idea to me sounds, sounds wrong. And you even pursue your idea a little bit, um, looking, you know, you’re thinking, okay, so the earth, if the earth is flat, if I take off from Paris and I go from there and I, I traveled westward and I go to London from London to New York city, to Seattle, to Tokyo, and eventually come back and wait a second versus flat, how am I able to come back?

And you even were more conscientious than that. You look out the window, you said, next flight. You said, if the earth is flat, you know, in order for me to get back, the only way that this could happen is the earth is a cube. And you’re looking for the edges of that. And you keep looking outside, you don’t even sleep or eat.

They just look and look and you can never find the edges of that cube. And so you go to one of the funding agencies, like the national science foundation, and you put it on an application for money because you want to study this. Obviously, if the earth is round, everybody should know about it because it’s really pretty important if it’s not flat, if it’s round and you come with so-called preliminary data, so-called in the, in the scientific ground, the pictures that you’ve seen around earth and your story about looking out the window of the airplane, and I guess the, the funding agency and the gatekeeper at the agency received the application.

Oh, this is from Antwan and read through quickly. And oh, this looks pretty radical. This is very interesting. Um, you know, if this guy is right. It’s a fundamental change of scientists. So I better do my job and recruit the most competent reviewers to check out this application, review it and see if it makes sense.

Or if this Antwan guy is a crackpot, which is true. So who does he or she recruits the most famous people, the most accomplished and adept people in the field of the shape of the earth, right? Who are these people? Whether they’re the flat earth people. So it means: if you’re right, they are wrong., And they don’t like to be wrong, you know, nobody likes to be pretty wrong.

It’s human nature. So it goes to this review group and they read carefully. And what are they going to say? They’re going to say, they’re not going to be enthusiastic about giving you a score that allows you to get the money. Uh, on the other hand, you know, they have to be a little careful about their reviews.

So they’ll come up with something like, oh, you know, this is a very interesting application, but the guy has not proposed the proper degree of statistics or the proper statistical approach. He should come back again another time and be really careful. And maybe he should team up with some people in the field to make sure that.

That the right expertise is there. You’ll just miss the funding threshold, you know, and everybody around the table will be happy about that because they’re all flat earth people and they don’t want to be challenged. So your first-line reviewer will be a hero because he turns down your application. Now you multiply this by every scientific field and it’s all the same because of human nature.

Some of us may, as reviewers, we may think of ourselves as open-minded, but we’re also biological creatures. And there was an issue of survival. If you were right, they’re wrong. And if they’re wrong, they’re going to lose their funding. And if they lose their funding, it could be that they even lose their salary because a lot of people are funded from these research grants and that will be the end of their scientific career.

So the system is set up in a way inadvertently in a way that guarantees that the most far reaching of fresh ideas don’t get. And the end result is if you ask yourself, can you name a scientific revolution, major scientific revolution that’s occurred in the, in your lifetime, or let’s say in the past 30 or 40 years, I’ve asked that question to many and mostly they’re sort of dumbfounded, uh, without they can’t identify an answer.

And I’m not talking about a technological revolution. Like what’s allowing us to communicate as we’re communicating right now, not talking about that. That’s technology and technology gets plenty of funding, uh, from those who are basically exploiting this opportunity. But fundamental science is different.

There’s, there’s no obvious place where radical ideas, you know, like an iPhone, uh, could get the proper investment for development or research. And that’s why. Ideas like, um, I mean, fundamental, scientific breakthroughs, like the, uh, genetic code, which was in the mid 1950s. That’s how many years is that? 65, 70 years.

And the splitting of the atom, which is 10 years prior. I, those are fundamental scientific revolutions, of course, with many applications as has all scientific rev revolutions. But there’s no obvious mechanism to fund to support these radical ideas in, in science, not talking about technology. And that’s the reason why it’s probably hard for you to identify a genuine scientific revolution.

I mean, one that’s really impacted your life. Not like for example, um, uh, Higgs boson that got a Nobel prize a few years ago, you know, has that impacted your life in any way? Can you even understand it or explain it? There’s a cool

Antoine Walter: episode about it in the big bang theory. That’s what I can tell you, but, uh, that’s a sitcom.

That’s not nothing which is really impactful.

Gerald Pollack: Okay. And sit-com yeah, well, yeah, we don’t, that’s a separate category. So, so anyway is the reason. Y the idea of, uh, an Institute that funds specifically those ideas, that challenge mainstream ideas that have outlived their usefulness. And we’ve gone so far as to identify five, um, uh, projects out of more than 200 applications.

Pre-proposal applications. We’ve invited 15 full proposals and out of those with very thorough review, more than I think any other organization that I can, I can imagine Larry thorough review as selected five of those, that show extreme promise. And if we could get the money to fund them, I think some of those will produce scientific revolutions.

They show that much promise and we’ve also removed one obstacle. And I’ll tell you the obstacle because it’s sort of, it’s part of the territory. If you Antwan got some money from an organization to, uh, to pursue your radical round earth idea, you’d think that would be sufficient. Oh, I can do experiments.

And I could really show that the earth is round and you might actually do so successfully, but someone’s going to pop up from the flat earth society. Raise a flag and say, oh, Antwan, he’s a crackpot pay. No attention to. To Antwan. And what do you do? It is nothing you can do. You, you can’t stand up and wave your flag and say, no, I’m not a crackpot.

I’m really serious about it. Just doesn’t work. And the opposition has the numbers it’s across any sort of rebellion. And so it stops right there. Even if you get funded handsomely, you’re dead. So we know what to do about this. We know that if we fund you for your round earth idea, we’re going to look for up to 10 or a dozen laboratories, independent laboratories who follow your general line of thinking who think, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Antwan might be right. And I’m going to use my own methodology. I’m proposing to do that, to study the roundness of the earth. And next year, a dozen of you would go to the shape of the earth society. And you’ll pop up. And a dozen of you are presenting evidence using each one, using a different technique independently that yeah, the earth is round.

It’s impossible for them to call you a crack daughter. Even if they do, nobody will take it seriously because are all 12 of them crackpots independently. And we think that this approach will lead to scientific revolutions. So, you know, anyone who’s listening to this who, who has done well in life, or know someone who has done well in life wanting to give back to society.

I hope that you’ll consider contacting us or me. And the URL is very simple. It’s Ivy science.org. Hy-Vee like an intravenous, the Institute for venture Ivy science.org. And we’ll be happy to chat with you. This is I think, a critically important endeavor for the future of the.

Antoine Walter: Well, I’ll put off course, all these things in the episode notes.

So in case you want to click on it directly, it’s fascinating. It’s a fascinating approach. And it’s also very interesting, the way that you anticipate the potential repulsion, that’s a revolutionary idea might generate generation to have directly the antidote within the research. That’s quite a clever approach.

Gerald Pollack: Thank you.

Antoine Walter: Last element. First, let me give an advice to everyone listening to this. I think I can’t remember the last class I attended, where was one of the best in physics or chemistry. So just to say. I am an engineer, but I always prefer the math and the application to the terrorist. So I was a bit reluctant when I opened your book.

The first time I was really wondering if I would understand a single thing. And it turned out that it’s really written for everyone to understand. So even a crackpot like me was able to understand the really it’s very pleasant to read. It’s really the kind of book which you go through and you don’t have a lot of stuff while not having just pose the book and to take some notes and to write something, to understand what you just read.

I mean, it’s real and concrete, and it’s pretty easy to understand if you give it some brain time. So that is really so thanks for

Gerald Pollack: that first. Well, thank you so much for your kind words.

Antoine Walter: My point here as well is that the book was written in 2013 and I’ve seen on your website that. The book you’ve been working on on many scientific paper, I’ve seen that over your full career, you’re involved in 300 scientific papers.

And I saw that there’s quite a lot of them which have been published since the book. And if you have to take just a one or two that stand out within those, what would it be? And can you re recommend us some additional reading to follow on the fourth phase of oh, okay.

Gerald Pollack: Yeah. Um, uh, there are two of them and you’ll have to remind me of the second one.

When I started talking about the first one I will get, and the first one has to do with the, uh, uh, vascular system and in your body and what, what drives it. And the second one has to do with the understanding of what is pH really means. Okay. And the first one, it would take me a few minutes, but I’ll tell you the bottom line first, the bottom line is that everybody knows that your heart drives the circuit Dettori system, but we’ve found that there’s another driver that works together with the heart, and that is the, the blood vessels themselves to drive the blood.

And let me back up a moment, because this is a difficult one for, for people to, uh, to accept and believe. But I, I think we have the evidence for it. It means, uh, and it’s related to the easy water is how we came upon it. And there is a paper that we’ve submitted for publication, but it’s also uploaded on the bio archives for anybody to freely access it.

Right now pre-publication. And so we found in the laboratory that if you, if you take a, a tube made of hydrophylic material, like a straw and put it in water, that the water will flow through the straw from one end to the other without stopping. And we found without going to great detail, this goes on indefinitely.

We found that the energy comes from light, largely infrared light, and the end for the red light builds an easy annulus just inside the tube, which releases protons to the very core of the tube. And those protons are repelling his job there. They want to get out and they will get out either at one end or the other end.

And once they get out dragging water with them, Water comes from the opposite end and replaces, uh, what what’s missing. So you get this continuous flow. So we discovered that. And then one day I took a trip to Russia and I met with my dear friend Vladimir via cough, who is a professor and vice chair in the biochemistry department at Moscow university.

And he came and introduced me to his colleague and he was very eager for me to hear what his colleague had to say. And the colleague said to me, there’s a big problem in the cardiovascular system. And I said, Uh, one big problem with w w w what are you talking about? Big problem. Uh, because I had studied the dynamics of the cardiovascular system as a graduate student.

It was in fact, my PhD thesis about pressures and flows and the different vessels in the cardiovascular system, and actually thought we had it all worked out. It was very simple. So I came to this guy with my nose in the air, a little bit, some element of arrogance thinking, what is this guy going to tell me?

Within five minutes, he had me convinced that there was something really wrong with the conventional view, including the view that I had took only five minutes. So what did he tell me? He said, he said, do you know that the big problem is that the blood vessels are big and smaller and smaller, and the smallest ones are only three or four micro meters in diameter.

And through those three or four micro meter vessels have to pass. Particulate matter. That’s twice the diameter, the red blood cells are six or seven micro meters in diameter. So, you know, mother, mother nature didn’t make a mistake. Usually she doesn’t make mistakes. And so something is going on and he says that in order for these galumphing blobs to make their way through those capillaries, you have to squeeze them right.

Otherwise, and you can look at videos and you can see that, uh, videos of capillaries with red blood cells. They’re not the classic, um, uh, disc, like, so they all get squeezed as they’re flowing through the capillaries, it’s common knowledge, but what’s not common. Now this is the amount of energy it requires to squeeze them down and that he computed it.

He said, if the heart is responsible for driving those red blood cells through, it would need to develop something like a million times, the pressure that it actually develops. That’s high blood pressure parenthesis. So obviously the heart can’t do it all. There must be something else. And he started telling me his theories about what those something else is might be.

And he had a bunch of different ideas. And I must admit I was less focused on those myriad ideas than what we had just found in our laboratory. That when you have a hydrophilic surface too, if you have the energy coming in to infrared energy, that, uh, it will power the flow through the tube. And it’s based on the easy phenomenon.

So I’m thinking, oh, this is pretty interesting. You know, it might be that what’s going on is, yeah, it’s not just the heart is the vessels themselves who are acting, which are acting pretty much the same way as these tubes act in the laboratory. So I went back home and I tried to interest my student, Jane Lee in doing some experiments to check out.

And he admits to me that when he first heard the idea, he said, it sounded to him preposterous. On the other hand, you know, being a quote, obedient, unquote, that’s not what I tried to instill in my students actually quite the opposite, but he undertook the experiments and the results were positive and, and the way he did it, uh, was he took a hard from a chick, had chick embryo, and the embryo at age three, three days.

The vascular system is pretty well-developed, but the regulatory systems hormonal and, uh, neuronal and not yet well-developed. So it’s a fairly pure system of vessels alone. And the first thing he did was to stop the heart. It’s really easy to do. You just take a potassium chloride and you inject it in the heart and heart stops.

So what happens after the heart stops? Well, Uh, we’re solely responsible for driving the flow flow should stop right away, but it didn’t stop right away when I’m at a much lower velocity, but continued meaning something is driving it. And Lee found that he was not the first one to find that over the last century or so there have been half a dozen different reports from different scientists using each one, using different systems.

And they found the same thing that when the heart stops the blood capes. So it can’t, there must be something else you could argue in some of those studies that the conditions were not exactly right. There could be gravitation is driving the sort of flow, but he was able to rule out those potential artifacts in his experiments and the flow continues.

So he tested the most fundamental feature of the, of the flow phenomenon that we have found, namely, that infrared light infrared imagery is driving it. So he imparted infrared energy and he found that the flow reversibly increased by a factor of three times. So the results satisfies or satisfied the prediction that we made.

And I think that the answer. It doesn’t prove it, but it’s certainly consistent with the idea that in your body, it’s not just your heart, that’s driving the flow, which essentially everybody thinks. And I thought so myself, up until recently, but that there’s a secondary driver and that is the vessels themselves.

And how much did the vessels contribute versus how much does the heart contribute? That part is yet to be figured out. It’s not clear. So I think that is one of our, uh, significant, uh, you might say breakthroughs stemming from easy water is stemming from a laboratory observation, I think with a rather meaningful consequence.

Um, and as I said, it’s available, it’s uploaded on bio archive. Anybody, uh, could, could look for it, uh, there, and hopefully it will get published soon.

Antoine Walter: So that is number one. And you said, number two, you have to remind you is on PA.

Gerald Pollack: Yeah, what is PA? So when I was a graduate student, I started learning about pH and buffers.

How buffers work, you know, to keep, to maintain pH. And I could never understand how buffers work I tried and tried. And since then I’ve found that others ran into the same problem. They really don’t understand how buffers work and in our body, there are many buffers to maintain the pH. I gradually came to realize that it may be that my limited ability to understand, uh, uh, arose because of my own, my own limitations.

But since other people have had the same problem, understanding, you know, the, the, the equations are pretty clear, but understand that the principle and the fundamental level has evaded a number of us. I came to to wonder how all that might work. And so we began to study pH. It was motive. We got a simple result.

I’ll tell you in a moment, it was motivated not only by, by lack of understanding, but motivated by a question. I asked many people and nobody could give me a straight answer. And I asked, I asked the question, I could ask right here, if you have a solution with, let’s say low pH like acids or so, is it neutral or does it have a net positive charge?

And on the one hand you could argue, well, it’s got, it has a lot of protons in it, so it must have a net positive charge. And the other hand you could argue that no, it can have a net positive charge because if you have, for example, HCL, you’ve got H plus one cl minus one, they balance. And despite, yeah, you’ve got protons, but you have a balancing act and therefore it’s gotta be neutral.

And it turns out that, you know, roughly half the people I ask will say, oh, it’s Nutro. And the other half said, no, it’s gotta be positively charged. And the only way I can interpret that is, is that nobody learns, uh, when people study pH, what does it really mean? Um, you know, you’re not taught that because there’s a question that people don’t ask.

And I thought it was a relevant question to ask because people don’t know the answer, uh, as evidenced by the fact that 50% choose one option and 50% choose the other. And I was motivated to do that. Uh, someone had written the paper challenging, some point of view that I had. And this was a guy. I don’t recall his name, but a distinguished professor from, I think, member of the national academy of science, who said it’s impossible for anything to have net charge.

If you have, if you have a beaker full of some liquid, it can’t have any net. And he said, every physical canvas will tell you that. And I, I was thinking, you know, he might well be wrong, even though he asserted that with some, some kind of certainty. So, so we did experiments and experiments to check, to see whether solutions of different pH are they neutral or are they charged?

And the answer turned out unequivocally that they’re charged. And if you have low pH it’s positive charge, and the more concentrated you have, I’d say, if you put an acid in, the more positive charge would have, and the opposite, uh, with basic solutions, you know, the more basic it is, the more negative charge.

So what that means is. In your cells or anywhere if you have a solution, if we’re right. And I believe we’re right, because I think the experiments are really clear. The results are really clear that if you have a solution of a certain pH, what it really means is that you’re measuring the amount of charge and the solution.

And for me, that’s really a lot easier to understand than pH, which is fundamentally a mathematical construct, but more primitive and more simple as, you know, You’ve got a container of a liquid. And how much charge does that contain? This is similar to what’s inside yourselves. And you asked me earlier about, uh, easy water and what’s the pH value.

And I kind of equivocated say, well, it’s not really a liquid, but, uh, it’s got a net negative charge. And if you were to assign a pH through it, you’d assign a high pH as you were taking about, about doing. But really what it means is it’s got negative charge. I think everything is simpler that way. If you, if you run through to understand that it’s as simple as net charge, you don’t have to run through the mathematics and logarithms and whatever that sounds like.

I think it is, you know, I just have to say one more thing based on that, um, about the haka was razor, uh, stuff. Um, that’s the bit for another time, I think, uh, yeah, we’ve, we’ve abandoned. So when it’s Auckland’s razor, my, my colleagues was stand up in front of a seminar room and report something that is extremely complicated and they, they subtext is look how complicated this is, and I’m smart enough to be able to understand it and pursue it.

So look at me, I’m, you know, especially that it’s so deviant from the principle of outcomes, razor, which in my book is really fundamental to the whole foundation of science. When

Antoine Walter: foods spend three more hours trying to explore all the. Elements and all the bits and pieces that you left left and right within this conversation, because there will be much more to unpack.

But for today I tried to be a bit cautious of your time. So I propose you to switch, to do the rapid for a question to round that off

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Rapid fire questions:

Antoine Walter: In this last section, I try to have short question, which you can answer with short answers. And my first question is going to be what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Gerald Pollack: Well, when you say, have been working on, I guess there are a couple of exciting where we’re not moving into starting with water and easy water and such, we’re moving into, you might say applications.

I’m not sure if that’s exactly the right word because they’re not technological applications, but it’s gaining an understanding of the. And I have two books that both of which are almost complete and largely waiting for my son, who was a talented artist, who did the other stations on my fourth Facebook.

And so many people that have commented on, on the beauty of the illustrations and the whimsical nature of some of it, but he’s busy remodeling his house. And so I have to respect the fact that, uh, his family is now living in very tight quarters and waiting for him acting as general contractor to finish all that work so they can live in some reasonable comfort.

And so the two books that are kind of waiting on, uh, on the sideline and one of them said, what’s exciting. And so of course what’s exciting is what is the next step? And in the, in the book idea with the role of electrical charge in nature, and many of the phenomenon I argue that we see everyday, but we don’t really understand.

It’d be explained by a understanding that electrical charge plays a central role. As some of the phenomenon are amount to, for example, what turns the earth every 24 hours, what’s the origin of wind. How do clouds really form? Why does it rain sometimes and not other times, what’s the nature of gravitation.

How do fish swim? How do birds fly? Even somebody said, how do airplanes fly? Which you may be surprised in a scientific American article one year ago. I forget the title. The subtitle is even now, we still don’t understand what keeps planes in the air and surprising and scientific American, even the experts don’t understand.

So those are some of the topics covered and you can understand why a. It might interest me a lot. I find this exciting and, um, and the second book has to do with the structure of the atom, I think is wrong. The one we’ve learned, the basic construct, uh, and, and the, the surprise to many is, is that when the physicists came through with the so-called solar system model, and now greatly modified, uh, by quantum mechanics, the chemists said, uh, th and this came through through the physicists who were dominant at the time, the chemist said, this is nonsense.

It, it doesn’t explain the first reaction in chemistry. And they came up with a few other ideas. And, um, so I argue in the book, uh, reasons similar to the chemists. I didn’t know about it at the time. Why the bottle I think is fundamentally flawed, uh, very simple. Arguments. And I put forward a mechanism, which to my surprise is actually rather similar to what the chemists, the most prominent chemists had been advocating a hundred years ago.

And I developed that to Hologic stance so that that’s, uh, an applique is almost done as well. And that’s for me, the excitement and all of this started from, from water. And it started not only from water itself, but from some of the scientific principles that came out of a search for understanding of water.

And now they’re being applied scientifically, I don’t mean technologically, but scientifically to understand the world around us, obviously, I don’t know if I’m right. I may be totally wrong, but, um, those were fed back to me said, you know, your ideas make total incomplete. So I’m sure that they will be rejected by the colleagues who are in their respective fields.

How can this outsider come through with that kind of nonsense? He’s a crackpot, for sure. So anyway, I’m responding to that. I’m really excited about what we’re doing.

Antoine Walter: Going back to the field of water. What is the trends to watch out for in the water industry?

Gerald Pollack: I don’t follow the water industry with any degree of precision or detail.

It’s a huge, huge industry. What to look for? Well, you know, that’s when I, I guess it, it, it depends. Um, if the people in the water industry, uh, take the idea of easy water or a structured water, as it was once called them or other seriously, they may begin a rethinking of how to solve the problems that need to be solved.

And in that case, they’re going to follow along with some of the ideas that I’ve been hinting at, or, or suggesting, uh, ideas for filtration, for example, for energy harvesting. So far, my experience is those people are sort of practical, practically oriented engineers who don’t really follow the fundamental science.

And so I think they’re going to be, uh, as long as that whole. They’re going to be continuing along with, basically with what they’ve been doing, which is trying to improve what they’re doing. And you know, this great example, I forgot who was showed. It is a light bulb with a, a candle inside of it. And with a comment that, you know, the way to move things along is not to perfect, uh, candle lighting, um, to keep improving it, but to start something that is brand a brand new idea.

And so if, if they take account of what we’ve discovered, I certainly hope they do. They may be switching gears and solving the problems that they need to solve. And we’re all aware of those problems. Uh, you know, getting rid of the pollution and the water, getting energy, renewable energy, and such. Um, the problems have been, I think pretty much outlined, but the solution.

Could they want it one of two paths and the current view of the current approach to solving them will probably yield incremental improvements, which they have been feeling. But I think we need to switch gears and those who have, you know, the interest in looking at the fundamental science, um, which, uh, you know, a good place to look is actually at our conference.

Um, the presentations are, have been video access, um, and it’s free. And so to follow the fundamental science, which is gathered together at that annual conference, a lot of eyes begin to open when they see that. And my hope is is that the trend will undergo a lateral or a reverse, uh, shift into something.

Completely new. And I think that’s going to take some time to happen. You were mentioning 30 or 40 years. I hope it occurs more quickly because the problem is so urgent right now. It’s a problem that we need to solve. Also, you know, the problem of climate and weather, I give the analogy of like a car it’s difficult to fix a car.

If you don’t understand the principles of how the steering wheel and the accelerator and the brake work, your car is towed to the shop. And, you know, he has no idea he or she won’t be able to fix it very well. And so I would certainly encourage to those who have the time and interest of a pursuit of learning, what basic science is now beginning to show that will change their course and accelerate the results enormously.

Antoine Walter: That leads me to my closing question. First a way to thank you for that very insightful discussion on my end. So it was very, very interesting to listen to your explanations and that’s opens the appetite if I may say so we’ll have another guest like you to recommend me. I should invite absolutely. On that same microphone.

Gerald Pollack: Oh, um, uh, my goodness, uh, yeah, toward the practical and, and, um, and especially in terms of health and a person that I would recommend is Gina. Gene that runs the so-called hydration foundation. She’s not a scientist. Uh, uh, she understands the critical importance of water and hydration of, uh, of the body.

She wrote a book that I, I think is a best seller. It’s called she and her colleague it’s called quench. And it deals with the role of water. And she understands, uh, although not as scientist, the role of structured water, easy water in, in sales. And, and she’s a really dynamic, uh, kind of person. And so, um, I can certainly connect you with her, but you can easily find her, uh, hydration foundation, Gina B R I a sorry, family name.

Uh, I think she would be a really interesting guest for you, although she’s not French.

Antoine Walter: I don’t invite that much French on that microphone just because they have the same shitty accent than I do. So it’s not,

Gerald Pollack: uh, your accent is beautiful and by the way, I, I’m not sure. I’m not sure if we’re on the air off the air, but I must say that I really appreciated your, I really a penetrating questions that has show huge insight into call of these.

Um, uh, so thank you for your unusual insightfulness. Uh, very much appreciated.

Antoine Walter: Well, that makes the perfect conclusion to this episode. Thanks a lot. Thanks for all of that. And I’ll make sure to have your books as soon as they are. ’cause w teased us two additional ones and maybe that’s, uh, a right point in time that you have a followup discussion and be very, very

Gerald Pollack: happy to do so.

Maybe that would be my great pleasure. Thank you so much.

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