Chapter III: The Rock–Water Circuit Theory
The Rock–Water Circuit begins with ISAW: iron, sulfur, aluminum, and water. Together, they form the mineral-water engine that stores energy in rock and carries it into life.
By Pierre Kory and Matt Bakos
The theory I am about to present in this chapter emerged gradually while I was writing From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV), after my colleague MB began connecting some of our mineral observations with descriptions recorded in much older texts. That unexpected intersection pulled me into fields I never imagined I would spend months immersed in: mineralogy, soil science, geochemistry, and origin-of-life research.
Several distinct factors set this theory apart. It did not emerge from a single discipline or even a single line of inquiry, but from an unusual convergence of fields. Its development was made possible in part by modern AI tools, which allowed us to explore connections between multiple fields at a scale that would have been difficult to manage otherwise.
More uniquely, our work was also informed by a body of texts from antiquity, particularly those associated with the Hermetic canon, that have long resisted clear interpretation. For centuries, these writings have been treated primarily as symbolic, philosophical, or mystical literature. Through our understanding of Shimanishi’s experimental work, we were able to decode descriptions of natural processes that had not previously been fully recognized. When those depictions were examined alongside modern scientific knowledge, an unexpectedly coherent system began to emerge, with each body of knowledge illuminating and extending the other.
Although not yet peer-reviewed or formally published, what we call the “Rock–Water Circuit Theory” is a planetary systems theory that describes how mineral chemistry and water interact to form a continuous energetic architecture linking geology and biology across the Earth system.
Origin of the Hypothesis
It is important to point out that this theory began with our fascination with a material extracted from rock. Before we had language for the core mineral chemistry involved, and before we had any model of a planetary circuit, we were confronted with a liquid mineral extract developed by Shimanishi whose effects were difficult to explain. In clinical settings, in agriculture, and in water systems, it appeared to alter behavior in ways that suggested something fundamental in nature.
When we analyzed its composition, certain elements appeared consistently and in unusually high concentrations, especially iron, sulfur, and aluminum in an aqueous medium. What began as an attempt to understand the properties of that liquid gradually expanded into a broader hypothesis: that this combination might represent a core chemistry through which energy is stored in rock, then transferred and expressed in natural systems. The Rock–Water Circuit emerged as our attempt to follow that possibility wherever it led.
What follows is our attempt to describe that chemistry first as a recurring mineral-water cycle linking rock and life, and then as part of the broader planetary energy architecture that made such a cycle possible.
Before we move on, I need to acknowledge authorship. As with the Geohydrological Shift Theory in FVTV, MB is again not only a co-author but also the senior author. This chapter carries his insights as much as mine.
Next, I must cite the work of the geochemists, biologists, physicists, and earth system scientists whose work informed ours, in particular Vernadsky, Cairns-Smith, Hazen, Russell, Lane, and Kappler, among others. Without them, our ability to make the connections below would have been impossible.
Author’s Note
For readers who do not come from a scientific background, or who do not naturally gravitate toward scientific material, I ask for a bit of patience. These three short chapters are the only sections of the book that lean heavily on scientific concepts, and they do not require technical mastery.
If you would prefer not to spend time on a simplified tour of geology, chemistry, physics, and hydrology, you may skip ahead to Chapter VI, where I provide a summary before introducing the remarkable achievements of the Japanese engineer and scientist Asao Shimanishi.
The science asks only for conceptual engagement. You do not need to retain granular details of how each component operates. What matters is that you grasp the overall sequence and recognize the boundary between the modern scientific framework through which Earth’s systems are currently understood and the point at which we believe this work extends that framework.
These three chapters move in sequence. The first two describe the Rock–Water Circuit, the recurring cycle through which a specific iron-sulfur-aluminum-water chemistry forms in rock, is opened, mobilized, and carried by water, enters living systems, and eventually returns to the geologic domain. The third steps further upstream, to the earlier planetary energy architecture that made that cycle possible: the Deep-to-Surface Energy Gradient.
The Recursive Mineral Cycle
Only gradually did it become clear that these observations pointed toward a unifying view of Earth’s life cycle, in which mineral chemistry formed in rock, was opened and carried by water, entered living systems, and eventually returned to the geologic domain. It was this larger pattern that we began calling the Rock–Water Circuit.
A core concept is that the mineral chemistry identified by modern science in biotite—and linked by some origin-of-life researchers to life’s emergence on Earth—also became, in our view, part of the recurring energy architecture later inherited by living systems.
That same mineral chemistry is then mobilized by water and transferred into living organisms, where it is reorganized to perform work: moving electrons and protons, sustaining gradients, powering metabolism, and enabling structure. At the end of life, that same chemistry then shifts roles. Water is again the agent, but now its main role is to dissolve, transport, and redistribute the same minerals and carbon back into the ground, where the cycle restarts, unchanged in principle, only in form.
This is a recursive process, a term that bears defining here: a process that uses its own output as part of its next input.
But the deeper insight of this chapter is that the cycle is not driven by minerals in general. It is driven by a specific chemical engine: the coordinated interaction of iron, sulfur, aluminum, and water, with water acting as the control layer that integrates and activates the other three. We refer to this system as ISAW, the Iron-Sulfur-Aluminum-Water system.
Beyond this core architecture lies a broader mineral field—potassium, magnesium, calcium, manganese, molybdenum, silica, and numerous trace and ultratrace elements among them—whose interactions and importance are often too numerous, subtle, and context-dependent to summarize cleanly.
One clarification will help here. Minerals are the source. Ions are the dissolved, charged forms through which those minerals act in water. Biology and water chemistry operate largely at the level of dissolved mineral ions, even though those ions originate in minerals.
ISAW simply names the core organizing engine as we currently understand it: the dominant architecture through which the larger mineral symphony is stabilized, activated, and carried forward.
The Opening of Rock
To see how the Rock–Water Circuit begins, we start with biotite, the rock in which the ISAW system first takes shape.
The starting point for this investigation was our fascination with a rock, more precisely, a mineral, called biotite, or “black mica.” Biotite is the dominant parent mineral through which nature generates vermiculite, the open, layered substrate that Shimanishi later employed as the foundation of his process. Vermiculite’s uniquely open structure and extraordinary capacity to exchange and deliver mineral ions make it one of the most important rock-derived sources of biologically available mineral nutrition on Earth.
Here and throughout these chapters, “mineral ions” or “ions” refer to minerals in their dissolved, charged form, the form in which they move through water and become biologically available.
We believe that it was vermiculite’s unusually rich composition of iron, sulfur, and aluminum, and the way those elements interact with water, that led us to where we landed. What follows is a tracing of that path inward, toward the chemistry that quietly powers life, decay, and renewal on Earth itself.
Biotite: The Parent Mineral
Biotite forms tens of kilometers below the surface of the Earth, where heat, pressure, iron, sulfur, aluminum, silica, and a wider field of trace mineral participants coexist. We focus here on iron, sulfur, aluminum, and water because they appear to form the core architecture of the system. However, we also recognize that they operate within a far richer mineral matrix whose full complexity likely exceeds our ability to map cleanly.
In such crystalline basement environments, water moves almost entirely along fracture networks, where flow is constrained and water residence times lengthen. Under these conditions, water does not just pass through, dissolving a few minerals while in brief contact before moving on. It instead resides against fracture walls, repeatedly acquiring minerals from rock surfaces over extended periods.
A critical discovery was that the same iron-sulfur-water chemistry in rock also drives the weathering of biotite into vermiculite, revealing a continuous engine operating across geology and biology.
Once vermiculite forms, water enters its interlayer spaces, enabling ion mobility and supporting proton transfer along hydrated mineral surfaces, while the layered aluminosilicate framework preserves structural order. This is the point at which minerals begin acting in their dissolved ionic form rather than remaining locked in rock. At this stage, iron-sulfur-aluminum-water chemistry becomes generative, as life emerges downstream of this opening. Biological systems rely on the same architecture—iron-sulfur clusters, layered membranes, structured interfaces, and proton gradients—to perform work. In this way, metabolism follows the same physical logic already present in the mineral world.
Life did not invent this engine.
It inherited it.
To see how this mechanism works, we now have to step inside the engine itself and examine how it generates, stores, and releases energy.
The Fundamental Energy Unit of All Life
Before we can examine ISAW chemistry in rock or its expression within life forms, we must first understand the simplest engine that governs energy itself.
For anything to be alive, carbon is an absolute requirement, not only because it provides structural architecture, but also because its chemical versatility underlies metabolism, energy transfer, and molecular specificity in living systems. Less commonly acknowledged is that there are two other material requirements for life: minerals and water.
That’s it. Three things. Without access to these, nothing can remain alive, as they are the critical components of the machinery that generate, store, and regulate energy.
Electrostatic Potential as the Fuel of Biology
At the center of every atom sits a nucleus containing positively charged protons. Surrounding that nucleus are negatively charged electrons. The attraction between separated opposite charges creates a form of stored energy called electrostatic potential energy.
Science can describe that relationship mathematically and predict its behavior with extraordinary precision, but it does not finally explain why the universe is structured this way.
Asking why a proton separated from an electron creates, or is, energy eventually brings you to a place where there are no more words and no more explanations, similar to trying to explain the concepts of gravity or time.
The attraction between a proton and an electron is a foundational energy relationship in nature. What is striking is how often that same pattern—separation, tension, and release—reappears across physical systems.
Another expression of this polarity appears in electromagnetic energy itself. A changing electric field generates a magnetic field, and a changing magnetic field generates an electric field. The two do not remain isolated but continuously give rise to one another in an oscillation that can travel through space as light.
Variations of this same pattern appear throughout nature, in chemistry, biology, and geology alike: potential must be established, held, and directed before work can be done.
This same pattern shows up in both nature and literature: sun and moon, sky and sea, earth and heaven, seed and soil, parent and child, king and queen.
And this is where the story becomes chemically concrete: that same electrostatic relationship appears in its simplest form in hydrogen.
Hydrogen is just a single proton with one electron to balance it. That simplicity is why hydrogen sits at the heart of life’s chemistry. Wherever protons move, hydrogen is involved, and wherever hydrogen moves, energy, stored in the attraction and separation between charges, moves as well.
The outer electrons interact with other atoms, forming bonds or moving between them. When an electron moves or binds to a different proton, energy is either stored or released. Biology constantly exploits these redox reactions, that is, electron transfers. Furthermore, this electron movement releases energy in small, controlled steps rather than all at once.
A positive charge reflects a shortage of electrons, while a negative charge reflects an excess. Life runs on the controlled separation and reunion of these charges. Electrons flow. Protons are displaced, accumulated, and released in response.
The Primacy of the Proton Gradient
Although protons repel one another, when they build up on one side of a membrane more than the other, they create a gradient across that boundary. That imbalance stores usable energy. When narrow, structured channels allow the protons to flow back across, the stored energy is released and converted into work that can push, turn, or build something else.
In biology, energy generation depends on proton gradients, which are differences in proton concentration and charge across a membrane or other interface. The analogy is simple: a dam holds back water so that it rises to a higher level on one side. That difference in height stores potential energy. When the spillway opens, the water rushes downward, and that stored energy is converted into useful work, such as pushing turbines that generate electricity. In living systems, proton gradients serve the same function.
In this chapter, the word redox will be used frequently. Think of it simply as an electron moving to or from a charged mineral center.
In biological systems, redox reactions transfer electrons from one center to another. Each time an electron steps down to a lower-energy center, it releases energy. That energy is used to pump protons uphill across a membrane, creating a proton gradient.
The dam analogy can be extended here. Electron flow is like the upstream force that fills the reservoir, gradually building the height of the water behind the dam. The proton gradient is that stored height. When protons are allowed to flow back down toward equilibrium through structured pathways, the stored energy is released as usable work. In this way, electron flow helps build the gradient, and the gradient in turn powers the system’s next round of work.
Humans
In humans, electron flow drives proton pumping by inducing precise conformational changes in mitochondrial membrane-embedded protein complexes, allowing them to move protons uphill against their gradient.
This action effectively converts electron energy into stored electrochemical pressure, known as the proton gradient. When protons are permitted to flow back through narrow, highly ordered channels, that pressure is converted into ATP, the transferable energy currency of the cell. Electron flow charges the system; proton flow discharges it; ATP is the measurable product of that exchange.
Plants
In plants, a slightly modified version of this system operates within chloroplasts (the plant’s mitochondrial counterpart), beginning with the sun’s photons energizing the electrons in photosystem II, which then splits water to generate the protons and free electrons needed, thereby forming proton gradients that drive ATP synthesis.
Microbes
Microbes represent the earliest biological expression of the same redox systems that operate in rock. Some rely directly on iron-, sulfur-, and hydrogen-based chemistry at rock-water interfaces, while others generate energy through mitochondria-like systems similar to those used by animals and humans. In either case, the same underlying metabolic logic persists.
Ultimately, as long as humans receive a continuous supply of electron-rich molecules through food, the metabolic battery continues to cycle. Oxygen acts as the terminal electron acceptor, allowing those electrons to move and release energy. Minerals sit at every junction of this process, forming the structural framework and catalytic centers through which biological energy systems operate.
That bridge is built from a specific set of elements, each governing a different dimension of this flow, and it is to those elements that we now turn.
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
From Research to Practice - Links Below Image
