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Hello Masako. Hey Asami. Today we will be recording our monthly episodes on 科学系ポッドキャスト.
This month it is hosted by 宇宙話と隣の分析屋さんの二つの番組をやっていらっしゃる
佐々木亮さんがホストしてくださってるんですけれども
Well he's kind of famous in podcast world so I feel like I don't have to
you know introduce him or anything but he his his PhD was in astrophysics so
that's what he was doing in 宇宙話 like he has like a daily
10-minute talks about 宇宙 like he does that daily which is crazy you know
週にでも十分きついのによ
so yeah so that's what he does and in the other podcast I actually also quite
like I like the second one more just because I'm more interested in data
analysis than astrophysics but he is talking with his colleague who
is a data scientist or data analyst I forgot which one they're
they're different I forgot which one he is but
they're different and but like yeah they basically talk about anything from
pop culture to more serious things using data and
pretty interesting give it a shot if you if you feel like it
but this month the topic is 地球 like the earth because
april 22nd is uh the earth day okay so like
um when that topic was brought up I immediately thought about this book
that I had just finished um and
I thought you know why not make this episode
about sort of introducing this book um and to you but also to the
listeners as well I actually have another question why is it
so it was the day before yesterday 22nd yeah yeah yeah yeah why is it the
earth day oh no it's 22nd of april oh april so it's
coming yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I forgot I forgot
is it the day that like some famous
なんかなんとか条約とかが結ばれた日なのかな
oh so it's not わかんない
so is it is it like international birthday
yeah yeah yeah I mean let's maybe maybe let's look up when was it
earth day origin the first earth day was celebrated in
1970 when a united states senator from wisconsin organized a national
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demonstration to raise awareness about environmental
issues in general okay and so yeah yeah yeah
and and that's the day that that was april 22nd
of 1970s that's like wow that's long time ago
yeah yeah I like to think about it that's pretty amazing because
I mean maybe maybe the environmental cause
at the time didn't necessarily mean climate change
yeah maybe it meant also like biodiversity
loss of habitat like things like that you know
like 70年代って特にアメリカではなんかね
national parkとかがすごいね できてた時期なんだよねたぶん
like let's protect the environmentみたいな
のが発足してた時で
そのそっちのカラーが強かったかも
but i feel like nowadays when you say environmental cause that's like almost
always if not directly at least indirectly
related to climate change right
なんかもうそれ抜きでは語れない感じじゃん
so yeah um but yeah good question i didn't know i didn't think about
looking it up so so thanks for asking 20 seconds
april april 22nd be kinder to the earth i mean every day but
especially that day um so the book and oh gosh uh i mean wish me
luck on trying to describe a japanese book in english
why am i why did i think this was a good idea
i don't know
it was such a good book and i i wanted you can you can do it you can
you can yeah i wanted to share about it um
well just maybe like a little back story about how i
encounter this book um one friday night i felt like reading japanese
like like a nihongo
but like none of the tsundoku that i had on my shelf
was like tantalizing to me i was like now
indiana yeah and so i asked my friend who i usually
ask for some book recommendation like
he recommended me like this book
it's by
magica
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but um you know i asked for his recommendation so i felt like
i was obliged to at least get it you know
and i started reading and
so and and it was one of those things where it was like
enjoyable to read but also extremely like
so i wanted to share this so once again this title is
energy
i mean i would like go through the book without hopefully spoiling too much
into it um and i hope that if anyone's interested they would go
ahead and buy the book and read it because it's really worth the read
in my opinion um so the book is roughly divided into three
sections and they he calls it three journey
so it's like not just about energy right it's it's a journey
surrounding energy so the three journeys that he goes over
in a book the first is
sort of the pursuit of energy and like how much energy
one can get so like quantity story
in one word if you were to describe this it's um
human history like a very brief human history
from energy perspective like from from energy consumption perspective
so starting from like cavemen and having access to fire which was
like you know the first form of controllable energy right because
prior to that there was sun but people didn't know
how to harness sun energy solar energy and there was
occasional maybe like coming out of this charge
occasional electricity but people also didn't know how to harness that
so fire as like the first controllable source of energy
right and and it goes from fire to agriculture
to industrial revolution to the invention of
electricity and finally to the invention of
fertilizers and so there's like four or five sort of huge leaps that
humans made in the history
on how to gain more energy and he prefaced this like this part of
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the journey by saying that humans are wired to be
greedy like humans we always want more more energy and
you know we couldn't we weren't just satisfied
with being able to heat our food or heat and keep us
warm you know we wanted more food without relying on hunting that's why
we invented agriculture and then we like once we have agriculture we wanted
to be more efficient get more out of the
agriculture that's why we have industrial revolution and so on and so
forth so um i like
this part of this part of the chapters like you know it's
nothing super new to me i guess and to too many people i guess as well
you know if they've done normal sort of high school history education i think
people have touched upon all of these topics at some point
but i thought it was interesting to sort of
pull that all together and see it through the common
axis of energy consumption so that was the first journey so the
quantity how we want more and then the second
part of the book talks about knowledge and this is more about how
we start to like a history of humans
understanding energy so this is more like a science history which was also i
mean me being a scientist super interesting and
it was doubly interesting to me because he he went
into quite detail about thermodynamics like
Clausius-Caplan-Clapeyron equations Maxwell equations all of that stuff
and i might scare some readers by saying all these names but
he really does go step by step so you will not get lost about this because
i've never done thermodynamics in japanese it was doubly interesting to me
to be like all of these concepts like
majority of energy revolution was inspired by the development and
understanding of thermodynamics so he goes
over that and what i think um so he go he starts from like
aristotle's idea
no like what people thought energy as and at the time um he well aristotle
aristoteles um he he's the one who sort of coined the term energy
as a way to describe something and that something in his mind at the
time was how seeds like black
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small seeds can bloom into flowers and he thought there must be something in
this seed that would like it's not just magic
right like there's there must be something in this
seed that would cause the flowers to bloom
and he didn't know what to call it um so he called this like act of
transformation i guess um and he called that
like an energeia or energeia i guess in greek reading and
japanese
but over time you know people started exclusively using energy as
a unit to describe um some kind of action right like
and like you know how in modern english and
modern language how the word energy is used is
usually very much that right like it's a unit of
energy like unit unit of a power or something that enables some kind
of action
but like to aristotle when he didn't know what energy was really
like he he was more interested in sort of like the process of how
this happens like how does the seed become
a flower like what is the process what is the journey
in between um so that's sort of where furutatsu-san comes brings back
the idea of journey once again and like
energy used to describe journey itself like the process of something happening
and now we exclusively talk about the outcome
of this right like outcome of this some kind of process
so so that was like an interesting knowledge like interesting sort of
philosophical thing that i didn't know previously
and then he goes you know starts from like aristotle
goes on to galileo the scientific revolution and newton
jules lord kelvin like all these names of people who each
sort of made a breakthrough about how humans understand
energy and not going to go into too much details
about it but um if you have some understanding of science this is
super extra interesting um chapter i think because when
we study science at least when how i studied
chemistry or physics you know we're not always concerned about
the history behind it right like the the whole
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history like we might be concerned about the
immediate history like
we don't really like every time we think about electrons we don't always
start from you know einstein right we can we can start from somewhere else
and somewhere else that's a little bit closer to us in terms of timeline
but it's always cool to sort of think about that
and like you know zoom out and think of a bigger time scale and it really makes
you appreciate how far we as human come in understanding
something really basic like energy like something that we deal with every day
and also i think it gives us an appreciation of how much we still don't
know about energy
and technical but still very accessibly written uh in the
in the quantity section we talked about the human history
and this knowledge section we're talking about
the history of humans understanding of energy
and so like that those two parts i feel like while it was interesting
it was not something i've heard of for the first time
very well presented though but this third chapter
he's like
okay
and then he starts talking about these like different religion
that worshiped energy and fire and things like that
and i was like oh where are we going with this like why are we suddenly
talking about like religious or spiritual things what does
what does it where is he going with it but
he quickly goes back to this concept that he talked about in the first chapter
where how humans are greedy and we are wired
to want more energy all the time and and and greed is an emotional
relationship so i think instead of like
i think at least how i understood it
i was i was thinking more in terms of like emotional relationship
that humans have with energy like emotional responses maybe it's not
the right way to translate it but at least that's how i
understood it um how like
like through all of this we have you know
freed ourselves from labor right like we instead of having to do having most of
us most of the humanity being involved in
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agriculture now it's like very few people
of the entire humanity that does agriculture every day
we freed ourselves from sort of that kind of manual labor
but we instead sort of started to subscribe to
this new religion of capitalism where we have to
consume more energy and produce more energy
and still consume even more energy in order to i don't know maximize
your lifetime income or maximize your lifetime happiness which is strongly
tied to your monetary satisfaction or productivity and how you
measure those things and those are all energy consuming activity right like
these capitalism requires you to consume energy
in order to survive so and and that's that's sort of um
that's almost like a religion like the way he framed it was like
it's almost like we're we're worshiping the god
of capitalism where we are doing everything to consume more
and more and more so that was an interesting sort of landing
point for me because um you know we talked about these like
up to this point it's like all very factual information
about like history and science history of energy and here um
he's like starting to introduce his own opinion about how we
relate to energy now and i do agree that there's definitely an emotional
element to it i don't think we can deny that
as long as there's capitalism right and and from this third chapter he leads to
the fourth chapter he calls it the destination
like tabi no moktekichi right like where should we land
with this you know struggles with energy and um he he shows
like few different options sort of like a few anecdotes
about how he thinks we should land um and that's so sort of you know i'm not
going to go into details but it's i guess it's up to everyone's um
like interpretation but the one example that he gave me that was interesting to
me is he brought up this example of like
so i forgot the exact definition but i like at
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least he had a more proper definition of
what these things are but um but basically he was saying that
like that the concept of iki
was not the most resourceful way of thinking
it was more about how to be yourself and how to be stylish
that was what iki was about
so he's sort of hearkening to the point of how japanese people never needed much
to begin with like we our our aesthetics
our ways of life have historically been tied to
non-monetary incentives like non-financial
incentives our sort of values lied elsewhere
and then maybe more like being iki right and he said that
we should re-evaluate this way of problem solving so like now
we're at the point where we reached like the maximum consumption of energy
and now we are facing with a problem of having to reduce
energy consumption all of us um and but like you know because we're
greedy we don't want to lower our quality of life
right we don't want to lower our living standard
but we need to consume less energy and what's sort of like the good
way to approach this problem basically the question becomes so how do
we satisfy ourselves with less like and not
just in like a superficial way but like how do we truly become happy with less
and how do we make an economic incentive for people to do that
and this concept of iki was like brought up as like hey we already used to do
this we already used to think
that having less as a possible like cool
identity we didn't always associate having more
or having more luxury having more access to be the coolest thing and if the
society as a whole could make it a cool thing to be
consuming less energy you know if we can frame reframe our
value system that way then the cost the sort of mental
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and economic cost of reducing energy consumption
becomes a lot less it becomes a lot easier
to reduce your energy consumption if it's a cool thing to do if it's a trendy
thing to do people want to do that you don't have to convince people to be
all electric housing or buy electric cars if you think and if
the world thinks it's a cool thing eventually people are going to start
shifting that way but right now we're not at that level
yet right like we're still at the point where like some people think
it's a very cool thing to do or maybe a necessary thing to do
yeah some people otherwise i i have a bit of complicated feeling
about that because because of recently the economy
is getting really bad and bad and the income is getting lower and lower
every year like my salary is decreasing compared to the inflation yeah yeah
and there are many more people who are suffering from these
difficulties and it's actually difficult to
you know tell people don't waste too much you know because we're not
in general because the life is getting tougher and tougher
so yeah maybe before um i could have agreed that you know we're
consuming too much let's think a little more about that
problem but now because of the life daily life
has been challenging to many people in general
um yeah i have a bit of complicated feeling
um because of that situation yeah in general i think that's fair that's
that's that's fair point and like i'm not gonna say i agree with
everything he says i would maybe agree like 75
80 and then there's often an element or two that i don't agree with
and i do think that the target audience for this like
are people in a privileged sector of the world right yeah like
i don't think he's saying that you know if you're already struggling to
like live day by day you should use less electricity or something
right he's that's not that's not what he's saying the thing is and and
factually like these people who tend to be below
poverty line like they they don't consume that much energy to begin with
you know instead like they're not doing international travel
so we should think about who's consuming so much energy right
right i mean and that's people like me i think the biggest
energy cost for me is the international travels that i do
several times a year i mean just just me existing
is energy consuming right yeah you can say that but i don't know it's
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it's it's i think i think the target audience is for people like me who have
spare time and spare resources to consume more energy
you know what i mean i mean maybe that's why it spoke to me
because there are many ways that i can sort of make my life smaller and
like achieve less carbon emission and i don't think that's necessarily
the solution to this whole problem but if people ask me asami do you think
you can cut down your carbon consumption yeah like with
of course with some sacrifice i can like i have a room to
like i'm privileged enough that i have a room to do that
right um and i think a lot of people like while it doesn't apply to everybody
i think a lot of people and certainly a lot of people
who live in a first world country do fall into this category of like
so it's about awareness in our daily lives yeah i i think it's also
awareness and um and it's something that
we cannot really avoid anymore we can't keep pushing this back the deadline
is coming up yeah and okay that then yeah i have a suggestion for you
i mean for us so because you brought up about traveling
you know back to japan right yeah then we should come
going anywhere yeah so we should come up with another plan
other than alternatives for taking you know planes okay
for earth because the earth day is coming up soon
uh-huh yeah yeah we should have alternatives
what what do you suggest should we should we uh
because swimming yeah swimming is it's just too far away swimming across the
pacific ocean is kind of hard yeah yeah yeah
um maybe i mean you know it's about time
we invent quantum teleportation you know okay like
we know how to break down into atoms we just don't know how to put it back
together in the same way that's why we cannot
teleport you know we cannot all use quantum
tunneling yeah but like if some smart guy or girl
figured out how to put us back together uh right through the quantum tunnel and
still claim they were the same people voila you know yeah yeah the solution
okay okay so that'll be the next i think i mean that would that would be
the next plan i mean i don't know how many centuries
of science it would take from there and i don't know frankly at this rate if the
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earth would exist many centuries later right in like a
human habitable way um so so i don't know if i want to bank
on that idea all that much but yeah i mean one can always dream and
i think uh you know part of doing science is
being able to think about these things in a semi-realistic way right
okay yeah yeah so but so so yeah that's that's just kind of uh that was the
gist of the book i think i like went through in
kind of quite some detail maybe but i think the part that i'm most impressed
about this book in general is how furutatsu-san
is able to illustrate and write in a way
that is extremely accessible without diluting the key concept and key
knowledge and some of that means quite technical
knowledge um you know and i'm saying this as a
person who has studied college level grad school level
thermodynamics i mean i'm sure there was like a
multiple iteration of this book with lots of you know editors and
discussions and whatnot i don't know how long it took to write
this book um because as far as i can tell from his
bio he's like a salaryman like he's not like
writing books is not his full-time job like he has other job
and he's writing this on the side so like that's so
also impressive yeah super impressive right so
so i enjoyed this book in multiple layers yeah yeah yeah
yeah that's it for the show today thanks for listening
and find us on x at eigo de science that is e-i-g-o-d-e-s-c-i-e-n-c
see you next time
