by Ulrike Granögger

University of Washington professor Dr. Gerald Pollack featured prominently in my 2024 report for Solari on Water. His discovery and description of the fourth phase of water is one of the fundamental scientific breakthroughs of our era.

When I interviewed him, I asked him whether he believes that there is a connection between the fourth phase of water and a fourth state of matter: plasma. To my surprise, his reply was that he hadn’t thought about plasmas, as they had “always been confusing” to him, and he couldn’t understand why positive and negative charges near one another wouldn’t just recombine.

Indeed, this is one of the remarkable aspects of plasmas, as we now know that plasmas form sheaths and double layers that keep the charges separated. What is fascinating is that the same happens in exclusion zone (EZ) water, as Prof. Pollack demonstrated, where highly ordered and negatively charged EZ water pushes positive charge protons out into the surrounding water.

Since our interview, Dr. Pollack has written a new book, Charged – The Unexpected Role of Electricity in the Workings of Nature, and in many ways answers that question about the fourth state of matter without specifically mentioning plasma. The book looks at a fundamental property of matter—charge—acknowledging that nobody really knows what it is.

At its core, Charged argues that electrical charge, traditionally considered secondary to gravity and inertia in explaining large-scale natural phenomena, is a primary organizing principle of nature that operates across all scales, from microscopic water to cosmic superstructures. Pollack’s central claim is that the natural world is never electrically neutral in practice, even if it appears so macroscopically. Although Dr. Pollack does not specifically refer to the fourth state of matter, this is precisely one of the features of plasma, which overall appears “quasi-neutral” but internally lives with a multiplicity of dynamic regions of charge separation.

According to this very educational and readable book, charge dominates weather, cloud dynamics, and rain initiation; it provides motion and lift to birds and insects, airplanes, and fish; and it dominates gravity to such a degree that Newtonian mechanics are neither required nor effective in explaining the large-scale structure and dynamics of galaxies and stars. In Chapter 12 of Charged, Pollack refers to plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén—outspoken critic of the “Big Bang” theory—and the group of researchers interested in the “Electric Universe” theory that Pollack has followed with interest. Charge, not gravitation, may be the force that ties the planets to the Sun and dominates structure formation throughout the universe!

It seems that unbeknownst to himself, Prof. Pollack has become a major voice in the scientific world of plasma. In short, Charged is not just a book but an intellectual challenge that invites the reader to engage with nature at a literally electrifying level.

(This Book review is part of the 2025 Annual Wrap Up on “Living Plasma“.)