Turbulent Beauty

The physics of Vincent van Gogh

Every so often, I stumble upon a news story that is so extraordinary it reminds me just how wondrous and unpredictable this world can be. 

That happened a few days ago when I came across a report that beautifully blended two of my interests—art and science—capturing the awe and upheaval each affords to the human experience.

The subject was one of the most recognizable paintings in Western art — Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” Van Gogh painted this iconic masterpiece in June 1889 as he looked east from his asylum room in southern France. It shows a landscape before dawn, with a cypress tree in the foreground and a town in the distance. The scene is based on a real view except for the town, which was a van Gogh creation.  

The artwork is dominated by its magnificent sky, with swirls of paint around stars and the moon. Rendered in bold brush strokes and color, these tempestuous currents are commonly seen as representative of the artist’s unsteady mental state and feelings of detachment. 

However, according to a new study published in the journal Physics of Fluids, some scientists looked at van Gogh’s depiction of turbulent air and saw something worth testing. 

An excellent article at CNN goes into depth: 

Using a digital image of the painting, (Yongxiang) Huang, (the lead author on the paper) and his colleagues examined the scale of its 14 main whirling shapes to understand whether they aligned with physical theories that describe the transfer of energy from large- to small-scale eddies as they collide and interact with one another.

The atmospheric motion of the painted sky cannot be directly measured, so Huang and his colleagues precisely measured the brushstrokes and compared the size of the brushstrokes to the mathematical scales expected from turbulence theories. To gauge physical movement, they used the relative brightness or luminance of the varying paint colors.

They found that the distance and intensity of the whirls were consistent with Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence (named after a Soviet mathematician), which models how energy cascades from larger to smaller structures in chaotic systems. But that wasn’t it. When the scientists examined the paint at a smaller scale, they found it corresponded to models for how bits of dust or algae might behave in swirling air or water.

No one is suggesting that van Gogh had one eye outside his window and another on a set of equations. For one, Andrey Kolmogorov didn’t come out with his theories until 50 years after van Gogh’s death. Rather, it appears the artist was just such a keen observer of nature that he was able to take from it and capture something quite profound in his work. 

James Beattie, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University who has studied the painting for a different set of work, told CNN:

It’s an amazing coincidence that Van Gogh’s beautiful painting shares many of the same statistics as turbulence. 

This makes some sense — the models have been constructed to try to capture the statistics of eddies and swirls on multiple scales, each swirl communicating with other swirls through the turbulent cascade. In some sense, Van Gogh painted something that represents this phenomenon, so why shouldn’t there be some convergence between the theoretical models and the statistics of Van Gogh’s swirls?

Our eyes are drawn to the chaotic movements of currents. We are transfixed by water in a river cascading over rocks. Billowing clouds in the sky overhead evoke wonder with their movements. But like much in life, even though we can see it doesn’t mean we fully understand it.

Huang, the author of the paper, told CNN this field of study has a lot of remaining uncertainty, and “a complete explanation (of turbulent flow) remains a prevailing mystery of physics.” 

One problem with the way we talk about science, especially in how we teach it, is that we strip away too much of the mystery. Our textbooks are filled with what we already know, but they too rarely convey how much we have yet to understand. What truly drives science—and excites scientists—is the thrill of pushing the horizons of knowledge.

Scientists and artists are both observers. Recognizing patterns and seeking meaning in them is a deeply human instinct. All of us, in our own way, are trying to make sense of a complex, chaotic world. We stand in awe of those, like van Gogh, who are able to see in ways most of us cannot. 

With this in mind, I am reminded of the song Vincent by Don McLean, better known by its first line, “Starry, starry night.” It was an exploration of van Gogh’s mental illness, written in the 1970s when such diseases were not as readily acknowledged. And it is a reminder that just as scientists still don’t fully understand the turbulence of flowing water and air, much of our physical and mental health remains just as mysterious. 

And yet, since the dawn of humanity, music, art, and the insights of those who have explored and explained the natural world — including modern science — provide evidence that the human mind possesses an ability to expand our knowledge and begin to process what was previously unfathomable. 

Those are, in themselves, reasons for hope amid any swirling storm of despair.