Gerald Pollack’s water theories January 31, 2008
Posted by Niels in : Personal , trackbackI was invited to attend Gerald Pollack’s talk Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views From The Water’s Edge at the University of Washington yesterday. It was the 32nd annual UW faculty address and as I was already on campus for steel drum practice, I dropped by.
It was an interesting talk with some compelling evidence under certain very common conditions, water behaves like a gel. In fact, if Pollack is correct, it’s possible that most of the water in the universe is in a gel form, rather than a solid, liquid, or gas.
Obviously, if true, this would be revolutionary research, which may be part of the reason I have reservations about the talk. Most of the people who saw the lecture with me were skeptical as well. Without the weight of an academic institution behind it, the research sounds straight up pseudosciency. But his results have been published in peer-reviewed journals and independently confirmed.
The biggest question for me is if this is really a paradigm shift in how we think about water, why isn’t anyone at the more prestigious universities looking into it? A number of people suggested that academia is slow to embrace new ideas, but my experience at Berkeley was the opposite - professors get really excited at the opportunity to jump on new research topics.
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