A new study finds swirls in Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' match physical theory.
A)
The dappled starlight and swirling clouds in Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night reflected the artist's troubled mind when he painted the work in 1889.
Meanwhile, in a study published on the 17th in the journal Physics of Fluids, physicists from China and France suggest that Van Gogh had a deep, intuitive understanding of the mathematical structure of turbulence.
Turbulence is a common natural phenomenon observed in fluids such as flowing water, ocean currents, blood and rising smoke; it refers to a chaotic state in which large vortices form and break into smaller ones.
B)
Although it may appear random to the casual observer, turbulence follows cascading patterns that can be explained, at least in part, by mathematical equations.
According to the study, "Starry Night" is an oil painting depicting the view just before sunrise from an east-facing window of a hospital room in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, southern France, where Van Gogh was admitted after cutting off his left ear.
The researchers used digital images of the painting to examine the sizes of the 14 primary vortices to understand whether they were consistent with physical theories that explain the transfer of energy from larger to smaller vortices through collisions and interactions.
C)
"Starry Night" and turbulence theory:
Since it is impossible to measure the atmospheric motion of the painted sky directly, the researchers measured the precise brush strokes. They compared their size with the mathematical size predicted by turbulence theory. They also used the relative brightness of different paint colours to measure the physical motion.
The study found that the size of the 14 eddies in Starry Night and their relative distance and strength obeyed the physical laws governing fluid dynamics, known as the turbulence theory of Soviet mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov.
They also find that the smallest eddies mix with background eddies in a way predicted by turbulence theory, following a statistical pattern known as the Batchelor scale.
D)
Huang Yongxiang, the study's lead author, said that while Van Gogh probably didn't know about such equations, he probably spent much time observing natural turbulent flows.
"I think this physical relationship must have been in Van Gogh's mind, so when he painted the famous 'Starry Night', he imitated the actual flow," Huang said.
"It makes sense," Huang said. "The model is built to capture the statistics of multiple sizes of eddies, each communicating with the others through turbulent chains. In a sense, Van Gogh painted a representation of this phenomenon, so it's not surprising that there is a match between the theoretical model and the statistics of Van Gogh's eddies."
New study finds vortexes in Van Gogh's "Starry Night" match physical theory
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