Gerald Pollack blew my mind with “The Fourth Phase of Water” and its implications for not just homeopathy, but biochemistry, and even the potential of pure water to act as a battery, storing charge separation.

True to form, he took those implications to the next several levels in “Charged,” daring to imagine that if water’s fourth phase truly does involve charge separation, this might explain many heretofore inexplicable phenomena in physics, that we simply had to accept as first principles in themselves. In “Charged,” Pollack tackles such diverse concepts as how wind works, what drives weather systems, how anything flies (from frisbees to birds to planes), why the earth spins (!) to what gravity actually is (!!). Honestly, a lot of these concepts only made vague sense to me before, from a macroscopic level—but I always had to just accept on the word of the experts that their explanations were sufficient at a certain point. Pollack, like a precocious child who asks “but why?” about absolutely every layer of explanation, drills down to expose the holes that were always there, and proposes an elegant alternative explanation that at least logically appears to hold, at every level of abstraction.

His last chapter echoes the last chapter of “The Body Electric,” in which Becker too explained why science is so rarely truly revolutionary anymore. Most science is conducted at the periphery of what is known, the “bleeding edge,” as it were. Pollack (and Becker, in his time) dared to question the fundamentals. Always an unpopular proposition for the powers that be, unfortunately.

My rating: *****

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