Dr. Gerald Pollack’s views on water have been called revolutionary. He attests that, despite what Mr. Wizard may have taught you, there are actually four phases of water: solid, liquid, vapor and gel.

This fourth phase, Pollack says, may in fact be the most important of all.

“If you want to understand what happens in any system – be it biological, or physical, or chemical, or oceanographic, or atmospheric, or whatever – it doesn’t matter, anything involving water, you really have to know the behavior of this special kind of gel-like water, which dominates.”

Pollack’s water studies have led to amazing possibilities: that water acts as a battery, that this battery may recharge in a way resembling photosynthesis, that these water batteries could be harnessed to produce electricity. He discusses these ideas in a lecture now playing on UWTV: “Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views From the Water’s Edge.”

Dr. Gerald Pollack takes you inside the world of his revolutionary water theory in “Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views From the Water’s Edge.”

Yet the search for these fresh views has not been without struggle.

“Before I became controversial, I almost never had a problem; I had large amounts of funding,” Pollack, a UW professor of bioengineering, explained. “The more controversial I became, the more difficult it’s been to get money. There were several really dry years.

“And now it’s gotten better because I think people are beginning to recognize the importance of the work on water. So it’s improving, but it’s still not easy.”

The study of water has a long history of unpopularity, Pollack said.

“Six or seven decades ago, water was a really interesting subject. A lot of people thought that water had a particular chemistry – that it interacted with other molecules and was really an important feature of any system that contained water. Then, research almost stopped 40 years ago. There were two scientific debacles that took place that made everybody highly skeptical of any kind of research on water.”

The first of these concerned polywater.

“Some findings seemed to imply that water acted as though it was a polymer; in other words, all the molecules would somehow join together into a polymer and create some really weird kinds of effects,” Pollack described.

Eventually, these results – first presented by a Russian chemist – were discredited.
“The nails were driven into the coffin of water research by another debacle that took place 20 years later, and that was the idea of water memory,” Pollack said. “The idea was that water molecules could have memory of other substances into which it had been in contact.”

A debate in the science journal Nature eventually moved public opinion against this theory as well.
“So because of these two incidents, scientists absolutely stayed away from water because water research was treacherous,” Pollack said. “You could drown in your own water.”

Yet, these murky waters were not enough to deter Pollack from the subject. He first broached the topic in his 2001 book “Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life.”

“The book asserts, contrary to the textbook view, that water is the most important and central protagonist in all of life,” Pollack said. “There are so many realms of science where water is central. In order to understand how everything works, you need to know the properties of water.”

As Pollack sought to understand water, his focus turned to a particular phase near hydrophilic surfaces that didn’t quite fit in.

“The three phases of water that everybody knows about in the textbook just don’t do it. In fact, it’s a 100-year-old idea that there’s a fourth phase of water. This is not an original idea.” Though the concept of a liquid crystalline, or gel-like, phase of water has been around for some time, the generally accepted view is that this kind of water is only two or three molecular layers thick. “And what we found in our experiments is that it’s not two or three layers, but two or three million layers. In other words, it’s the dominant feature,” Pollack said.

With this revelation in hand, Pollack focused his attention on this mostly unstudied phase of water. He has since discovered much about its underestimated thickness, its capacity to create a charge, its connections to photosynthesis and its practical applications.

The thickness of this gel-like water may explain why items of higher density than water – such as a coin – can float. Surface tension is at work, but it arises from this thick, gel-like surface layer.

“Turns out that the thickness depends on the pH,” Pollack said. “If you increase the pH, we found that this region gets thicker. It also gets thicker with time. So if you wait long enough, and if you have the right conditions, and maybe enough light beating down on it, you could conceivably get a very thick layer.

“If we come up with the right conditions, maybe it’s true that we can walk on water – if this region can be made thick enough.”

Biblical aspirations aside, the energy carried within this water and the water near it may be even more impressive.

Dr. Pollack works in his lab to demonstrate some of the unusual properties of water.

“This kind of water is negative, and the water beyond is positive. Negative, positive – you have a battery,” Pollack explained. “The question is, how is it used and might we capitalize on this kind of battery?”

The key to understanding how this water battery works is learning how it is recharged.

“You can’t just get something for nothing – there has to be energy that charges it,” Pollack said. “This puzzled us for several years, and finally we found the answer: it’s light. It was a real surprise. So if you take one of these surfaces next to water, and you see the battery right next to it, and you shine light on it, the battery gets stronger. It’s a very powerful effect.”

This effect takes on entirely new possibilities when considered in terms of the water within our bodies.

“I’m suggesting that you – inside your body – actually have these little batteries, and, remember, the batteries are fueled by light,” Pollack said.

“Why don’t we photosynthesize? And the answer is, probably we do. It may not be the main mechanism for getting energy, but it certainly could be one of them. In some ways, we may be more like plants and bacteria than we really think.”

All of these innovative ideas may have practical applications as well. Water in its gel-like phase excludes solutes.

“It’s actually pretty pure,” Pollack explained. “If you could collect this water right near the surface, it should be free of bacteria, for example, and maybe also viruses. So we’ve constructed a prototype device in the laboratory that shows excellent separation, on the order of 200 to 1. And we’re now trying to scale this up to practical quantities of water that could be filtered.”

A second possibility is extracting electrical energy from this natural water battery.

“We’ve so far been able to get only small amounts of electrical energy out, but we just started the project,” Pollack said. “If this process that we found is the same as photosynthesis, or the same principle, and I do think it may be, then it’s a pretty efficient system.”

Pollack and other researchers clearly have a long and complex challenge ahead as they seek to understand water in new ways. But you don’t have to know Pollack well to see that the challenge itself is part of the intrigue of pursuing such work.

“I’m so compelled to continue our studies because they reveal so much and they answer so many questions – even already – questions that have remained unanswered for so long.”
For Pollack, finding answers is a way of life.

“I dream this stuff,” he confessed. “It never leaves me. If I’m sitting on the plane, sitting on the toilet seat, standing in the shower, it’s on my mind always.