00:11
What does that mean? Like what does 理系 mean? You know, I kind of wanted to question that because
I… the academic disciplines are becoming more and more interdisciplinary and
becoming more… I learned the word in Japanese, it's 学際的。
Ah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. I'm learning my Japanese. So it's hard to, you know,
make a distinction, like this is scientific and this is not. And this belongs to other
non-science research. And, you know, my field fits pretty squarely into the traditional scientific
field. Like, you know, a lot of people would imagine someone like me doing, you know, what I
do sounds very sciency. I don't usually have to convince people that what I do is scientific.
But I think yours, your research is a bit more in a grey zone, more so than me. So I want to
hear what you think about it. What do you think about the word 理系? I still don't know about
理系 and 文系. So I did… I searched online. Oh, like a dictionary. Yeah, yeah, dictionary.
Yeah, yeah. We love that. We love the research. Yeah. And then it said arts and sciences,
like 文系 and 理系. But I don't think this is the, you know, it doesn't fit my…
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, that's a very dry dictionary definition.
So I still… I don't consider myself as 文系 or 理系. Yeah. So it's somewhere in between.
So… Tell me more. Yeah. I never… I never defined, actually. So I don't… It's probably
because of my… how I entered my research field is a little different from how, you know,
how other people might… Yeah. Okay. Because, you know, first I entered the literature and then
I switched to the current field. It was natural for me, but yeah, probably that's why I don't
define myself. Maybe… Yeah, maybe you saw sort of like a common theme throughout your interest.
So for you, it never really changed, but from the others outside looking in, it's like, oh,
03:04
you switched fields. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So… Yeah, I think it is… It's…
まあ便利な分け方, right? Like, I know that some people are saying like we should stop,
you know, referring to 理系 and 文系, you know, this should all be interdisciplinary. And like,
I get where they're coming from, but I also feel like there's definitely a value in just like,
you know, being able to categorize things. And it's just for like quick shorthand of things.
If you think about 理系, you know, you think about physicists, chemists, biologists, and,
you know, those and other hard sort of like capital S sciences. And, you know, 文系,
you think about people studying Shakespeare, people studying like artworks, 美術師,
and stuff like that. 哲学. Yeah, 哲学. It's like kind of fun and easy to sort of like
imagine that. And that's sometimes convenient. But I sort of like, ever since you brought this
question up, like, what is 理系? そもそもね? What do you consider scientific? I,
like, that gave me a food for thought. And I sort of kind of temporarily decided that for me,
it is a discipline in which you can quantify your curiosity. Like, something you're interested in
figuring out is quantifiable. It just so happened that you can measure that, or measure something
related to that in order to understand the bigger picture. And, you know, not everyone's curiosities
are designed that way, right? Some people's curiosities are not exactly measurable. How does,
like, how, you know, I don't know what, I'm trying to remember what my what I did in my philosophy
class that was way too long ago. But, you know, if you're thinking about, like, how do you prove
that you exist in this world and not in some metaverse, you know, that's not a quantifiable
curiosity. But it could be an interesting endeavor for some people. And it just so happened
that, you know, I want to learn about the molecules and what happens to them in their real time. And
that's why my curiosity aligns with sort of science field, and it's considered science.
But yeah, it's interesting too. Like, when you think about measurement and quantum mechanics,
06:06
those are, like, it's a very interesting concept in quantum mechanics. You know,
when you measure something, you sort of forcibly
make a result, you measure something. And until then, until you measure it, everything is in
superposition states, but you measure and you decide on something. And hopefully, in science,
you know, we try to measure it over and over and over again, so that we can say that, yes,
this happens reliably in most conditions. And hopefully, we can sort of use that result in
some interesting way. But, you know, who is to say that the other measurements that you didn't make
are invalid, right? Right. So, yeah, that makes me think about,
in my field, even if we measure over and over again, still we may not be able to see the right
answer. So it may not be true. I know a little bit about your research, and it's a very
tough data. It's ambiguous. Yeah, unclear and ambiguous. And it's hard to reproduce.
It's very, yeah, it's hard to reproduce. And we try to get to the answer, you know, the truth
that we believe there is some kind of truth, but it's hard to say. And because everything is
indirect, like the measurement is indirect. So the data we get might not be correct.
The noise level might be too high. Yeah. But in my field,
we, you know, for hundreds of years, we only had indirect measurement until very,
very recently, we have, like for specifically for, you know, my ultra fast molecular dynamics
field, we finally have a tool that we can study, basically molecules in situ, right, like in its
real time, time frame. Yeah. So, but that, you know, that took a lot of people's hard work to
get here and also billions of dollars. It's, it's a very, yeah, it's an interesting endeavor. So,
you know, who knows, maybe we'll be, we'll be probing into your subject directly in, you know,
hundred years time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's something we're trying to, to get to the more
09:01
like a, like a core. I don't know how to describe this. It's, it's the, it's the center of something
that we think is there, but we haven't reached yet. Wow. Getting deep here, huh? Yeah.
Maybe we should stop around here. Okay. All right. That's it for the show today. Thanks
for listening and find us at Eigo de Science on Twitter. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
