Self, Nature and Technology
Section editor: Dr. Gitanjaly Chhabra
"The Force of Nature II " Statue in Doha, Qatar
Listening to the
Equations of Nature
Interviewer: Dr. Gitanjaly Chhabra
Costa Karavas, Assistant Professor
ACSS Department, UCW
Gitanjaly (G): How do you see mathematical patterns revealing the underlying intelligence or rhythm of the natural world?
Costa: Well, our world around us, nature, when looking at the mountains, trees and coastlines, they are not only beautiful to look at but have been created under balance with patterns that are not random. They reflect mathematical order that governs the growth and movement of what we see in nature. Nature organizes itself with precision and elegance. The branching of trees, the network of rivers and coastlines, all show self-similarity structures at different scales. That is, if you take a picture of part of a tree or a snowflake, and zoom in, you will see the same structure but at a smaller scale. This idea of self-similarity, whereby structure is repeated at smaller scales is called fractals, and it was first introduced by the French mathematician Benoit Mandlbrot in the 70’s. It was very revolutionary at that time. Scientists worldwide tried to make better prediction models in all areas of science, from oil and gas exploration to global warming models, knowing that nature behaves in this orderly way.
Gitanjaly (G): How have you personally experienced or observed the connection between mathematics and the natural world?
Costa: Some of my early research concentrated on exploring and interpreting the fractal characteristics of sedimentary sequences, as revealed by their geophysical seismic signatures, more specifically the acoustic impedance (density multiplied by the seismic velocity or rock formations), using a systems-approach methodology. The aim was to obtain a deeper understanding of how geological settings of gross scale can be capable of hosting oil and gas reservoirs. This research was funded by Imperial Oil while I as at McGill University. It was a very exciting period for me.
Gitanjaly (G): In what ways can mathematical thinking help us understand our interconnectedness with nonhuman systems, such as ecosystems or planetary processes?
Costa: Mathematics often has been called the language of the Universe. It provides a very concise way to analyse and describe patterns, relationships and structures around us. Like any language it uses, instead of words, symbols and rules, many times called laws, to formulate complex ideas. It is universal as it is used from all people worldwide and all can communicate and understand each other. It is used to explain the behaviour of natural phenomena. For example, the Fibonacci sequence appears in the arrangement of leaves and flower petals showing how plants grow efficiently to capture sunlight. In Calculus, we describe how quantities change and how planets move in their orbits. In Statistics and Probability, we use theory and data to study weather patterns, genetics, and ecosystems, helping scientists predict outcomes in complex systems. So, there is significant interconnectedness between mathematics and living ecosystems.
Gitanjaly (G): Can mathematics serve as a bridge between abstract human concepts and the tangible realities of nature?
Costa: Mathematics indeed serves as a bridge between abstract human concepts and the tangible realities of nature. It provides tools that allow us to model, analyse, and understand complex phenomena that are difficult to observe directly. A prime example is when I teach Linear Algebra: humans can only perceive 3 dimensions. We live in a 3-dimensional world. However, using abstract mathematics, we define higher-order dimensions. We can manipulate multidimensional objects, perform transformations, and solve equations without ever “seeing” them physically. These abstract operations have direct applications in the real world. For example, in Data Science and Machine Learning, neural networks operate in high-dimensional spaces when learning complex decision boundaries. In Economics, models involving multiple economic indicators such as inflation, interest rates, GDP, and employment, use high-dimensional matrices to represent and analyze relationships among these variables. Many times, I say to my students “We don’t need to see higher dimensions in order to believe”.
Gitanjaly (G): Do you think mathematics has an aesthetic or ethical dimension when used to interpret natural phenomena, and how does that influence our relationship with the world around us?
Costa: I would say both. For sure, aesthetic which comes from the elegance and harmony, that mathematical structures reveal in nature. Nature operates according to principles of order. This sense can inspire curiosity, creativity, and a deeper emotional connection to the natural world. When it comes to ethics, mathematical models that predict things like climate change, population growth, or natural resource depletion, carry a large weight, as they help shape policies, which in turn can have a direct impact on communities and directly human individuals. So, I think that mathematics should not just be a tool for solving complex problems in nature; it must be applied responsibly, with careful consideration for society, sustainability, and the well-being of human life.
“Nothing ever becomes real
till it is experienced”:
Blake, Ecology, and the Digital
Dr. William Rubel, Associate Professor
ACSS Department, UCW
Over the spring and summer of 2025, I worked on an ambitious piece of research-creation, Robin Redbreast in a Cage, an original science fiction/climate theatre play, which I developed with a five-person ensemble and which ran at Performance Works in the Vancouver Fringe Festival. The goal was to explore the relevance of William Blake, and his faith in human imagination, to the climate and biodiversity crisis.
Now considered one of the top 100 Britons in history, Blake lived in poverty and obscurity in industrial early-19th Century London, a printer who dared to self-publish by engraving his poems and drawings directly onto copper plates. Hoping to prosper without the middleman, he and his wife Catherine barely scraped by on sporadic commissions by a few sympathetic patrons, yet left behind a vast mythos, unfurling a sweeping critique of the narrowed modern mind that made him a muse of the Beat Generation.
Since 2010, I’ve been attempting to stage Blake, creating ensemble-driven works of eco-theatre to reignite not just environmental awareness but ecological consciousness. My premise, explored in my dissertation (UBC 2018), is that, to deal with the climate emergency, we need to romance modernity – recognizing how and why modernity has shut down our receptivity to relational and ecological flows. Clearly, we need to stop viewing nature as a resource or collection of objects with utility, and re-embrace it as an end-in-itself, or what Kant called a flow of “purposiveness without purpose.” We need to restore our felt sense of ethical interrelationship with the more-than-human, which means reactivating Indigenous ways of knowing. Kant, and other Enlightenment philosophers, were of course implicated in severing those felt interrelations, but the early 19th Century Romantic poets, as A. N. Whitehead understood them, actively proposed a counter-Enlightenment and alternative modernity grounded precisely in the mind-and-heart expanding experience of interconnectedness (for which they used the word “Imagination”).
Fires, floods, droughts, storms – none of these have seemed real to us. We see them through screens. We imagine they belong to other places and other times. We tell ourselves that artificial intelligence will save the planet. This is what happens when we cut ourselves off, imaginatively and experientially, from the world as a flow of interrelationships. Blake’s fellow poet, John Keats, put it best: “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced” (“To George and Georgiana Keats,” 14 February – 3 May 1819).
Experience is the crux of our troubled times. An AI (even if endowed with cutting edge sensory processing and given a robotic “body”) cannot experience. The Romantics called for a radical renewal of trust in experience, because experience, at heart, is relationship. Experience is human (and more-than-human). Blake would have associated AI with the “mighty Polypus,” a cancer spreading (as an extension of disembodied reason) from colonial England all over the world, spreading fibers of uniformity into bodies and minds. Part of the return, from the inhuman to the human, the corporate to the common, is a return to the arts. “For the Eye altering alters all,” Blake wrote. This is why I value research-creation, the putting of insight into practice. As Blake put it:
Without Unceasing Prac[t]ise nothing can be done
Practise is Art If you leave off you are Lost
The world isn’t just given to us ready-made, after all. It’s a process of collective imagining, in which we each play a part.
There have been many international attempts to stage Blake. Perhaps the most celebrated is Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009), starring Mark Rylance (current president of the Blake Society) as wild, charismatic Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a squatter whose claims to the land shake up a small English village. Less easy to recognize, but far more Blakean, with undertones of Frankenstein (by Blake’s contemporary Mary Shelley), is Philip K. Dick’s post-apocalyptic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (and its better known film adaptation, Blade Runner), in which a weary ex-cop known as a “blade runner,” is forced back into duty to hunt and “retire” four escaped replicants – bioengineered humans built for off-world labor. The Nexus-6 replicants, led by Roy Batty, have returned to a decaying Earth (where robot housepets are a marker of social status) seeking to extend their four-year lifespans. Although alluded to in Blade Runner, Blake, and his relevance to questions of technology, remains underexplored. With that in mind, I applied for a UCW Discovery Grant, and embarked on a research-creation project with the ultimate aim of creating a theatre event that I might share with the Blake Society in London, for Blake’s upcoming 200th Anniversary in November 2026.
Imagine this: in a near future, after the climate collapse, AI manages corporate-style “campuses,” enthralling the populace with a beverage it calls JUICE and a ceaseless stream of public executions in the form of a reality TV survival show, Outsider.
I took the title for the show, Robin Redbreast in a Cage, from one of Blake’s best known poems, Auguries of Innocence, which is ironically often not recognized for what it really is: not a song praising fake bliss through mind-expansion but a passionate ethical and ecological protest. For the production, we created a minimalistic set: the right side of the stage shows the wilderness “Camp” (cubes clustered to represent a rock) where Robin talked to his TV audience as he starves, while the left side shows a “Campus” apartment (cubes with stark, linear edges) where his former mentors watch him struggle. To bridge these zones, ORC, the LED-lit humanoid AI that oversees both Camp and Campus, throws Robin into painful past memories. Light and sound design (by Andrii Krupnyk) enhanced the contrast: warm green light and forest sounds for Camp, and cold white light and machinic humming for Campus. (The show was also filmed, using two cameras in 4K at 60fps, by multimedia artist Masayuki Iwase.)
What the audience experiences, ideally, is an interactive, cybernetic triangulation of Camp, Campus, and AI, from which a fourth zone emerges. After one hundred days alone in the wilderness, cut off from the neural enhancing JUICE, and in the late stages of ketosis, Robin grows porous to the intangible (more-than-human) dimensions of nature – dimensions that threaten and tantalize the AI.
For more information, visit: The Book of Thel – innocence at the edge of extinction
Mountains that
Taught me Finance
Dr. Sidaq, Assistant Professor
ACSS Department, UCW
During my student years, I was a member of the university’s photography club. One semester, we had the opportunity to work with a nature magazine to capture sunrises from seven peaks. At that time, I was majoring in finance. I didn’t expect that financial lessons could also be applied in life.
Once the expedition began, some mountains were easy to climb, while others proved to be very unpredictable. By the fourth mountain called Twin Peaks, we were tired. Our guide informed us that there were two ways to climb. One was a safe trail through the forest. The other was a steep, rocky path that could get us there faster and offer a better sunrise view, but it was also risky. Half the group picked the forest trail. The rest of us, including me, picked the ridge. At first, it felt like a good choice, with better views of the valley, but then the weather changed. Strong winds caused us to start slipping on loose gravel. For a moment, I really thought we might not make it. But we did. We reached the top and saw the sunrise with colours of pink, purple, yellow, then orange. I was in complete wow, it was the most beautiful and hard-earned sunrise of my life.
That morning, something from my finance lectures finally made sense: high risk, high return. The ridge gave the best view, but it also came with risk. Finance is the same. For high returns, you must take calculated, informed risks, not blind ones.
Later at the camp, the guide smiled at our tired faces and said, “That was only the fourth of seven peaks. Don’t use all your energy on one mountain.”
That reminded me of my finance lesson two. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. In finance, that’s diversification: spreading risk so one failure doesn't break you. In life, it’s a balance. Don’t give all your energy to one mountain, one dream or one relationship. That would be too risky.
When the expedition ended, I returned with seven sunrise photos and two life cum finance lessons. High risk, high returns, and never put all your eggs in one basket.