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Interview : Hope for Synthesiology−133 Synthesiology - English edition Vol.1 No.2 (2008) at all. They can only really be made by practitioners. It’s no use asking a theoretical chemist whether a contribution is relevant to the development of, let’s say, some industrial advance because that theoretical chemist may not know what industrial development matters or not. In some ways there probably is an objective measure of what’s good or what isn’t good, but it’s not a measure or standard that is necessarily going to be known by researchers in the field. A peer in the same discipline or in the same field may not be able to make a judgment about how good these statements are.(Kobayashi)If the reviewer is not in the same field, he or she may be able to look at the objective, relevance and scenario in terms of logic. If it is logically not good then, I think, it is not accepted as an article. An important element is a good chain of logic.(Lester)I think you can judge the logic without necessarily having deep knowledge of the field. If the scenario is supposed to consist of logical steps, then I think maybe it’s possible to judge the strength of the logic without having deep knowledge of the technical field. (Kobayashi)Let’s look at an example. Take the environment problem which is very important in the 21st century. To reduce carbon dioxide is a very high priority work and most people will agree that this is a big objective. If the steps to achieve this goal are logical, then the scenario is OK.(Lester)So that’s an example of a scenario. If I understand you correctly, the ultimate objective here is to see an emission reduction, but to get that you have to do something here, and to get this you in turn have to do something there. One of the requirements that the editors have identified is that the author has to lay out these stages in order to get to objective. Is that right?(Kobayashi)If this is logically OK, then that can be acceptable. But, of course, we have many alternatives.(Lester)So you want to have what we might call “an existence proof”. You want to show that it’s possible to get to where you want to be logically. (Kobayashi)Also the originality of the synthesis of technology is important. In this journal, we have selected six papers and the individual authors synthesize for the realization of some results, I think, with an originality. But if anyone can easily think of the method then it doesn’t have much originality. (Lester)It has to be non-obvious -- is that the point? It should not be obvious. If the combination or synthesis is obvious, then it’s not a good contribution.(Kobayashi)Yes. In this paper—“To the Low Cost Production of Highly Functional Optical Elements” by Dr. Nishii(see Synthesiology, vol.1 no.1 p24-30)—Dr.Nishii has proposed the use the mold method of glass, lens or optical components. The old method is not sufficient to make good devices. Imprinting to make some structures on the lens is needed, but imprinting on optical devices has been very difficult. Recently some people in their companies have developed a method, so he joined this mold and imprint methods together in order to make very good optical devices like this. This is a good combination of mold method and imprinting. This is a very original combination.(Lester)If I understand this example correctly, it’s a case in which the author brought a rather conventional method together with a new method and combined the two things. And the contribution that the author made was to identify the new advance in imprinting and see that it could be combined with a traditional method. So that was considered to be a good contribution. I think there is maybe also a higher level of contribution, one that also involves integration or synthesis, in which the author actually proposes a modification to one or more of the items that are being integrated, so that they actually can be integrated. In other words, the author sees an opportunity to integrate two elements or two components but only if one or both of those components are somehow modified, and the author actually proposes the modification prior to the combination. That might be an even more valuable, original contribution. (Kobayashi)In discussing with the authors, I have thought of some kind of different way of synthesis. Maybe you are more familiar with this. My idea is that the first type is, in German, “aufheben”, a Hegel thesis, to make a new concept with the combination of the different thesis. The second one is a breakthrough type. There is a very important key technology, like this here, with many peripheral knowledges. But this cannot make good on its own and so, in the process, something is combined to, as shown here, here, here…(Lester)And these things are known?(Kobayashi)No, but they should be modified. The third is more objective or scenario-driven or strategy-driven type. It might be a little bit different from manufacturing things. These have an equal (61)−

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