When Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh produced "The Starry Night" in 1889, he is believed to have put paint to canvas to illustrate the chaotic conditions inside his own mind. Yet according to a new article the journal Physics of Fluids, "The Starry Night" did more than simulate Van Gogh's struggles with mental illness; it also displayed an intuitive understanding of mathematics and science.
Physicists in China and France analyzed "The Starry Night' and noticed that the dappled depictions of starlight and clouds accurately recreate the swirling, flowing and billowing qualities regularly observed in fluids. Specifically, they followed Kolmogorov's theory of turbulence, which holds that small-scale structures will hold physical properties that are statistically homogeneous, isotropic and independent of related large-scale structures. As the authors noted, "This result suggests that van Gogh had a very careful observation of real flows, so that not only the sizes of whirls/eddies in 'The Starry Night' but also their relative distances and intensity follow the physical law that governs turbulent flows."
