Gerald Pollack, a popular professor of bio-engineering at the University of Washington Medical School, is used to swimming against the current of traditional beliefs about science — water, in particular, and its shape-shifting phases. He’s published more than 250 papers on the behavior of water. He’s written half a dozen books mostly on water, including his 2013 The Fourth Phase Of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. His faculty “Biological Sketch” page reads like the resumé of a Nobel Prize recipient. It’s not inconceivable. He inches closer, having received the prestigious Prigogine Medal in 2012 for work on thermodynamics of dissipative systems.