Van Gogh's "Starry Night" may reflect a real arrangement of celestial bodies

- It has long been believed that the gradations of starlight and clouds in Vincent van Gogh's painting "The Starry Night" reflect the turmoil in his psychological state when he painted it in 1889. But a new analysis conducted by physicists in China and France indicates that the artist had a deep and intuitive understanding of the mathematical structure of turbulent flow, a common phenomenon in nature, which appears in moving fluids, such as river water, ocean currents, and blood flow, as well as in rising storm clouds and plumes. Smoke.

This phenomenon is characterized by chaos, as large eddies form and then disintegrate into smaller eddies. Although this movement may appear random to an observer, it follows a gradual pattern that can be studied and partly explained using mathematical equations.

“Imagine that you are standing on a bridge and watching the flow of a river,” said Yongxiang Huang, lead researcher on the study published in the Journal of Fluid Physics on Tuesday. “You will see eddies on the surface of the water, but they are not random. Rather, they are organized into specific patterns that can be predicted according to the laws of physics.”

Huang is a researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science and the College of Ocean and Earth Sciences at Xiamen University, southeast China. The painting “The Starry Night” is painted in oil on canvas and, according to the study, shows a scene before sunrise from a window looking east in the room where Van Gogh stayed inside a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, southern France.

The artist had admitted himself to the asylum after mutilating his left ear. Huang and his colleagues used a digital image of the painting and studied the sizes of the 14 major eddies to see if they matched physical theories that explain the transfer of energy from larger eddies to smaller ones as they collide and interact.

The Starry Night and Turbulent Flow Theories The movement of the atmosphere in the sky that Van Gogh painted cannot be measured directly, so the researchers carefully measured the brushstrokes and compared their sizes to the mathematical metrics predicted by turbulent flow theories. To estimate physical movement, they relied on differences in the brightness of paint colors.

They discovered that the sizes of the 14 vortexes in “The Starry Night,” the relative distances between them, and the intensity of each one, follow a physical law governing fluid dynamics, known as “Kolmogorov’s turbulence theory.” In the 1940s, Soviet mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov described a mathematical relationship between fluctuations in flow speed and the rate of dissipation of its energy.

Huang and his team also found that, at the smallest scales, the paint mixes with some small background eddies in a way that is consistent with what turbulent flow theory predicts, following a statistical pattern known as the “Batchelor scale.” This measure mathematically describes how small particles, such as algae drifting in the ocean or dust particles carried by the wind, are mixed by turbulent flow.

James Beattie, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University in New Jersey, who was not involved in this study, but has conducted similar research on works of art, told Ofoq News: “This is remarkable. These are actually the statistical patterns we expect when ocean currents sweep away algae clusters, or when winds carry dust and fine particles.”

“In my research, I only focused on the large eddies in the plate, so I didn't notice this second relationship,” he added, referring to Batchelor's scale. 'Amazing coincidence' Van Gogh, of course, was not familiar with these equations, but he likely spent a long time observing the phenomenon of turbulent flow in nature, Huang said. He added: "I think this physical relationship was ingrained in his mind, so his famous 'Starry Night' painting mimics the real flow."

"It's an amazing coincidence that a beautiful Van Gogh painting shares many of the same statistical properties of turbulent flow," Beatty agrees. He explained, "This is somewhat logical, as the models are designed to simulate the statistical properties of eddies of different sizes, as these eddies interact with each other through a series of successive disturbances."

In a sense, Van Gogh painted a work that embodies this phenomenon, so why don't the theoretical models and statistical properties of his vortexes converge?" The study team conducted the same analysis on two other images, one of which was the painting "Chain Pier in Brighton" by the British artist John Constable, painted in 1826 and 1827, and the other an image of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, taken by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft on March 5, 1979.

The study noted that Constable's painting "lacks, unlike Starry Night, clear swirling patterns, but its clouds are full of formations of varying sizes, resembling those often seen in the sky." “The Starry Night” is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and is one of the most famous works of art, recreated using Lego bricks, drones and dominoes.

Huang pointed out that scientists have long faced difficulty in describing turbulent flow in fluid dynamics in a way that allows it to be predicted, and that fully explaining this phenomenon is still one of the existing mysteries in physics. He added that understanding it in depth will help predict the weather, understand the weather turbulence facing aircraft, and study many other operations.

“Despite more than 100 years of studies, we don't even know how to define this complex phenomenon,” Huang said. “It is extremely important, but very difficult to understand.”

For his part, Beatty said that the Starry Night painting's match with statistical models of turbulent flow, even though the painting is not actually moving, may indicate that statistical methods and tools are less accurate than scientists thought. He explained that measuring the phenomenon accurately in the painting is not possible, because “it is not actually a turbulent flow...

However, Beatty emphasized that he was a huge fan of the painting, considering it to capture the universal character and beauty of the turbulent flow. He concluded, “What I conclude from studies like this is that Van Gogh succeeded in embodying an aspect of this comprehensive character in the beautiful painting “The Starry Night.”

I think people realize that; They feel that this painting contains something wonderful that attracts them to it.”