Van Gogh’s Starry Night Surprisingly Reflects Laws of Physics, Scientists Discover

3rd Oct 2024
Van Gogh’s Starry Night Surprisingly Reflects Laws of Physics, Scientists Discover

Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night is iconic for its swirling skies and vibrant, expressive style. However, recent studies reveal that this famous artwork not only captures the imagination but also reflects the real principles of physics.

Scientists have discovered that the turbulent patterns in the night sky of the painting closely resemble the natural laws governing fluid dynamics.

The Starry Night: A Sky in Motion

While Van Gogh’s scene is a creative interpretation of a night sky, researchers have identified that the swirling motions depicted in the painting follow the laws of turbulent flow. Specifically, they adhere to Kolmogorov’s law, which explains atmospheric turbulence by predicting the movement and scale of inertial energy.

Van Gogh’s the Starry Night - physics
The authors measured the relative scale and spacing of the whirling brush strokes in van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” along with variances in luminance of the paint, to see if the laws that apply in the physics of real skies apply in the artist’s depiction. The results suggest van Gogh had an innate understanding of atmospheric dynamics. He captured multiple dimensions of atmospheric physics with surprising accuracy. Credit: Yinxiang Ma

The eddies and swirls Van Gogh painted, while stylized, appear to mirror the same chaotic yet structured behavior seen in real atmospheric conditions. The way energy cascades through different scales in turbulent systems is beautifully visualized in the painting’s flowing brushstrokes.

Tiny Details, Big Science

In addition to aligning with Kolmogorov’s theory, The Starry Night also reflects another principle: Batchelor’s scaling. This principle relates to energy behavior in small-scale turbulence, which appears in the diffusion process of pigment particles within the oil paint. According to Yongxiang Huang, co-author of the study published in the Physics of Fluid journal, this scaling is evident in how the paint behaves on the canvas, further tying the artwork to natural physics phenomena.

Future Possibilities

While the study of The Starry Night has yielded fascinating results, co-author Yongxiang Huang hints at future explorations of this type. If resources and students become available, his team might analyze works by other artists to see if similar patterns emerge.

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