Just watched a very interesting video on H3O2, aka the 4th state of water.
Ep3 - WATER: A Scientific Revolution, with Dr. Gerald Pollack, Bioengineering Scientist
Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan
Aha, this old chestnut again.
I did a fair bit of work on looking into this topic, three years ago, on another forum. There is no such molecule as H3O2, as anyone with basic chemical competence will realise. (It would have to be an odd-electron molecule or an ion for which someone has forgotten to include the charge.) So I thought I'd better find out what it was all about. For any interested readers, I copy below the text of the long post I made at the time after digging into it:
"Actually, I've had a chance to read around this "EZ water" thingie a bit more today. I found it was in fact referenced on the site I linked to earlier, about the various crank theories of water. The writer does not dismiss Pollack but, being a chemist, is sceptical, as am I!
I think I understand what Pollack thinks he is on to. He thinks he has evidence that wetted hydrophilic surfaces (e.g. glass, or cellular proteins) can impose a longer-range order on the adjacent water molecules than is generally recognised. He thinks this order excludes solute molecules from a layer close to the surface, rather as solute molecules are excluded from ice crystals as they form. As you may know, the developing lattice structure in a crystal can achieve greater stability (shorter and stronger bonding) by excluding foreign items that disrupt the regularity of the order - hence why salt depresses the melting point of ice and so forth.
What is bizarre is that he also thinks that IR radiation (O-H stretch frequency I think?) is required for this structure to develop. And he thinks the arrangement is one in which oxygen and hydrogen are present in a ratio of 2:3, giving the structure a -ve charge - as indeed one would expect from a ratio like that, which is effectively H2O.OH- . So that's where the "H3O2" claim I found earlier comes from.
He thinks the viscosity of this semi-ordered layer is a lot higher than that of free water (I can imagine it might be) and that, because there are hydrophilic proteins within cells, these features (viscosity, exclusion of solute) can provide an alternative account of the behaviour of certain aspects of living cells.
It is not clear what observational evidence he has, or whether anybody has tried to replicate his findings.
Needless to say, this has nothing to do with "memory". However you will not be surprised to hear that garbled versions of this have been pounced on by various snake oil salesmen (e.g. some fellow called Mercola, who I think has actually done time for misrepresentation), sundry homeopaths, cranks and pedlars of water-based health gimmicks. I feel rather sorry for Pollack: this is attention he could well do without, if he is trying to get a serious hearing for his ideas.
But I find the bit about IR irradiation, in particular, rather hard to believe. Generally, adding vibrational energy (i.e. heat) tends to
disrupt long range structure, as I'm sure most people with some knowledge of the kinetic theory of matter will appreciate. It also seems to me that a layer with the ratio he talks of could only be a couple of molecules thick or the -ve charge would be so great that it would be destabilised by mutual repulsions. H-bonds are not very strong. But I still can't find any independent write up of his research, so I can't resolve my scepticism at this point.
He clearly is someone who resorts to playing the victim card: there is a whole section on his website about the iniquitous conservatism of conventional "mainstream" [ugh!] science and the snuffing out of radical ideas. He doesn't quite say "they laughed at Galileo" but one gets the impression he has kicked up a stink about this at the university and the authorities have given him his head for the sake of an easier life - and good credentials for academic freedom I suppose. He also has a disturbing penchant for, yes you've guessed, videos, in place of papers. All this makes me suspicious that he may be a bit like Linus Pauling, who became notoriously eccentric towards the end of his life and espoused crank ideas about vitamin C. (Erwin Schroedinger and Fred Hoyle also became similarly eccentric in later life, and of course Tesla lost his marbles entirely, so it is not without precedent.)
So there we have it. He may just possibly be onto something, but we may have to wait for a decade or so before science is able to pronounce on fairly definitively. Meanwhile I am not holding my breath, for the reasons I have indicated."
So far as I can tell, this idea has gone nowhere. (The fact the Pollack has resorted to YouTube videos, rather than submitting research papers for peer review, suggests he may be awa' wi' the fairies. He must be older than God's dog by now.
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