Vincent van Gogh ’s The Starry Night (1889), which features a sky of swirling blue hues streaked with bright gold, is one of the most famous paintings in art history. Now, new research shows that the bold brushstrokes are an accurate scientific portrayal of the turbulent sky. The Dutch artist created the masterpiece from a psychiatric facility, which he had checked into after experiencing hallucinations and severing part of his ear.
While the work is sometimes interpreted as an expression of his mental health challenges, a new study in the journal Physics of Fluids suggests that it’s also a depiction of Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence , a physical law that describes patterns of fluid dynamics. Andrey Kolmogorov was a Russian mathematician who identified the way in which energy moves through water or air when it gets stirred up: Large swirls or “eddies” break into smaller eddies in a predictable way. This type of movement, called turbulent flow, can be seen in “moving water, ocean currents, blood flow, billowing storm clouds and plumes of smoke,” as CNN ’s Katie Hunt writes.
“Imagine you are standing on a bridge, and you watch the river flow. You will see swirls on the surface, and these swirls are not random,” co-author Yongxiang Huang, a scholar of fluid dynamics at China’s Xiamen University, tells CNN. “They arrange themselves in specific patterns, and these kinds of patterns can be predicted by physical laws.
” To study the sky in The Starry Nigh.