Dr Stephen Hussey, an American chiropractor and author of the forthcoming book Understanding the Heart (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022) has a radical view of the function of the heart. It’s not a pump, he maintains, so much as a regulator of blood activity, which whooshes around the body, he says, essentially on its own.

That seems heretical to all of us who have grown up with a view that arterial activity starts and ends with the insistent lub-dub of the heart.

But according to Hussey, and more particularly Dr Gerard Pollack, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, the heart’s activity all has to do with water—the water in the blood—and a fourth property of it after liquid, solid and gas.

The most common substance on the planet, water continues to bedevil scientists, even those working with it every day in the laboratory.

Water is a chemical anarchist that behaves like no other liquid in nature, displaying no fewer than 72 physical, material and thermodynamic anomalies, with many more apparently still to be unmasked.

A few frontier scientists have studied water molecules and discovered that they have the peculiar ability to act as a team. Two Italian physicists at the Milan Institute for Nuclear Physics, the late Giuliano Preparata and his colleague, the late Emilio Del Giudice, demonstrated that water has an extraordinary property: when closely packed together, molecules of water exhibit a collective behavior, forming what they’d termed “coherent domains,” like a powerful laser light.

These clusters of water molecules tend to become “informed” in the presence of other molecules, polarizing around any charged molecule and storing and carrying its frequency so that it may be read at a distance.

In a sense, water is like a tape recorder, imprinting and carrying information whether or not the original molecule is still there. As Russian scientists have observed, water has the capacity to retain a memory of applied electromagnetic fields for hours, even days, and other Italian scientists, from Sapienza University of Rome and the Second University of Naples, and more recently, Luc Montagnier, the late Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of HIV, have confirmed Preparata and Del Giudice’s findings: certain electronic resonance signals create permanent changes in the various properties of water.

The Italian team also confirmed that water molecules organize themselves to form a pattern on which wave information can be imprinted. Water appears both to send the signal and also to amplify it.

The late Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University and arguably one of the world’s experts on water, wrote a seminal paper synthesizing all current research at the time on what is referred to as the structure of water, concluding that those little H2O molecules are themselves the chief instigators of water’s anarchy, in the way they choose to cluster together.

When applied to water, “structure” refers to the position in three-dimensional space and the molecular arrangements of individual water molecules of H2O, which cluster together like endlessly varied reassemblies of Lego.

These clusters remain stable for anywhere from a fraction of a second to several weeks. Hot samples have a different Lego shape than cold samples, for instance; some water contains molecular clusters of up to several hundred molecules apiece.

It’s been discovered that small clusters can clump even further, creating up to 280-molecule symmetrical clusters and interlinking with other clusters to form an intricate subatomic mosaic.

As Roy explained it, the ‘glue’ making these water molecules momentarily adhere to one another has to do with a wide range of very weak bonds that exist between the different Lego shapes.

These are known as van der Waals bonds, so named after Dutch physicist Johannes Diderik van der Waals, who discovered that forces of attraction and repulsion operate between atoms and molecules because of the way that electrical charge is distributed, a property that allows certain gases to turn into liquids.

“It is this range of very weak bonds that could account for the remarkable ease of changing the structure of water, which in turn could help explain the half-dozen well-known anomalies in its properties,” Roy wrote. “In its subtler form, such weak bonds would also allow for the changes of structure caused by electric and magnetic fields, and by radiation of all kinds.”

According to Roy, research has shown that structured water can be produced through various forms of energy: heat, light, sound, radiation, including that from the sun - and the energy of a thought.

A documentary about water offered a graphic illustration of what structured water might look like. Ordinary water was depicted as separate asymmetrical clusters of molecules floating alone, like wheels with a few spokes blown off, but in the artist’s representation of structured water, the molecules had formed two perfect concentric circles. With structured water, the molecules behaved themselves, like a group of orderly schoolchildren seated at a round table.

Dr Pollack has picked up the mantle about structured water and discovered that water molecules form a hexagonal structure next to any hydrophilic (water-loving) surface—and one of those water attractors just happens to be the insides of our arteries.

Pollack claims that this phenomenon creates the flow and propulsion of blood, with the heart acting a bit like a cop keeping traffic to a steady speed.

Experiments carried out by Pollack’s team at University of Washington, among others, has demonstrated that blood flood can carry on—all on its own, even, in the case of animals, for a while after it has died.

If Roy and Pollack (and Hussey) are correct, this not only changes everything we currently understand about the heart and how it works, but also everything we do to treat it anytime it starts to falter.