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.
Comments»
I caught the latter part of this lecture on UWTV and my first reaction was - cold fusion redux. But as he went on I got more excited. If true the implications (to this lay viewer) seemed profound. But, could such phenomena have gone unreported this long? Alternatively, could such simple experiments be completely wrong… or is it the interpretation? Have you tried any yourself? I haven’t, but this lecture has me seriously thinking about it.
Re your comment:” Without the weight of an academic institution behind it…” Pollack is on the UW faculty, right?
I do, I have performed some of those experiments and the output is really surprising and puzzling. I had the great opportunity to spend two summers at Dr. Pollack’s lab and there he gave me absolute freedom to experiment, interpret and proof or refute any of his ideas. What happened? I could never find any real weakness in his ideas, the experiments do work, and maybe it’s just a matter of having the right interpretation for them (and that’s where I differ in some ways from his views).
There is plenty of theoretical support for what Pollack observes and it’s since long time that we and many other publish about it (last publication on PNAS January 26, 2010, vol. 107, no. 4, 1301–1306, “Effect of hydrogen bond cooperativity on the behavior of water” by Kevin Stokelya, Marco G. Mazza, H. Eugene Stanleya, and myself). For some reason it seems that we did not cross before with Pollack. But probably we can fix this soon.
The only difference between his interpretation and our is that we do not need to consider a “liquid-crystal” kind of phase transition, but a standard phase transition like between liquid and gas is enough. In this case the two fluids are two liquids at different densities and with different local structures. Moreover, you do not need to cross the phase transition to observe macroscopic consequences of the different local structure that is formed when you approach the phase transition.
To a research physiologist, Pollack’s conclusion is not at all difficult to accept. Just do some homework in the area of Alfred Pischinger’s Ground Substance (extracellular terrain) and you will be introduced to the gel-like properties of physiological fluids. This subject is the “Quantum Mechanics” of biology.
Robert Slovak
As far as I can tell just about any discovery that doesn’t make someone billions of dollars is label ‘pseudoscience’.
“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?”
Ever heard of Jacques Benveniste? A prominent French immunologist before his claims of a memory effect in water, his career was destroyed as a result of failure to reproduce his results. Academics tend to be intellectual cowards and conservatives. That’s because reputation is everything in our field. I work with palladium/hydrogen systems where the words ‘cold fusion’ are only whispered between between friends. Cold Fusion is taboo but Pons and Fleischmann’s results have been validated many times by competent experimenters. The problem is that there is no widely-accepted theory to account for the data and in this age of degenerate science theory rules and we tend to disregard inconvenient facts.
Pollack’s work seems sound. The lack of broad adoption of his ideas by academics does not changes the facts. Never confuse intellectual consensus with objective science.
[...] Energy, and Life: Fresh Views From the Water’s Edge Gerald Pollack’s water theories GA_googleAddAttr(”AdOpt”, “1″); GA_googleAddAttr(”Origin”, “other”); [...]
[...] Energy, and Life: Fresh Views From the Water’s Edge Gerald Pollack’s water theories Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. Tags: Complex Systems [...]
Complicate to profit is the slogan of our age. Disinformation, fads, trendy gimmicks and bold-faced lies assault us at every step, as the drones pursue their interests while abusing ours.
Trust no-one, not even the bearers of light can get it right in a meaningful consistent way and ultimately they sell you down the road in pursuit of their own advantages. Does your doctor, your lawyer, your fitness instructor, your vitamin salesman really know what they are doing. Are they doing good work for you, or for themselves?
We are being trained to be dependant, to be drones in the machinery of generating profits for somebody else. Raising someone else’s standard of life at the impairment of our own.
There are also the ranks of the programmed automatons, who parrot anything and everything they hear that is popular, willingly lubricating the droning gears of the propaganda machinery for their masters.
I am tired of listening to people ignorantly crusading on about this or that, and haven’t got a grip on much at all aside from parroting and hysteria. Their mouths being in fast forward and their brains in rewind as they sell short, themselves and anyone who will listen.
•There was a study conducted a few years back and it concluded by stating that by far the single greatest cause of death in the United States, was The American Medical System itself.
•The stock market crash of 2009 was caused because of the under regulation of markets and financial industries and the lack of incentives for business to regulate itself. The repercussions are still unfolding three years later as the government is apparently still unable to grip the nature of the problem.
•The church did make a mistake with Galileo, but it wasn’t until 350 years after his death, in 1992, that it finally apologized to him for referring to Copernican theory in his Dialogues.
It is understandable that politics, medicine, education, business and the church produce drones to suit themselves. In fact in order to be successful in climbing within these references the candidate must accept their paradigms and their errors in order to succeed to the top; to their drone master-ships. These are the very ones who, having excelled at learning all the wrong stuff all their lives, accomplish the most in perpetuating it, and defend it the most rigorously until the bitter end. It is after all the mastery of these prejudices that they take their greatest pride in while it is also their least defensible of points.
People should take the time to think things out conscientiously for themselves for a change. Separate and independant from the capricious outside paradigms that are leading them to ruin. Paying their dues, ignoring the quick and easy answers laid out for them, these eroneous templates of error . And just because the system tells you so, that doesn’t mean the system is correct, and you definitely don’t have to be one of their certified drones.
velis et remis
Robert