The chaotic sky of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ may correspond to a scientific theory | CNN

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The twinkling stars and swirling clouds in Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” are thought to reflect the artist’s troubled state of mind when he painted the work in 1889.

Now, a new analysis of physicists based in China and France suggests that the artist had a deep, clear understanding of the mathematical structure of turbulent flow.

As a common natural phenomenon seen in water – moving water, ocean currents, blood flow, storm clouds and smoke waves – turbulent flow is turbulent, while larger swirls or eddies, they form and break into smaller ones.

It may seem strange to the casual observer, but chaos nevertheless follows a strange pattern that can be studied and, at least, explained using mathematical equations.

Imagine standing on a bridge, and watching a river flow. You will see swirls at the top, and these swirls are not random. They organize themselves in a unique way, and these kinds of patterns can be predicted by the laws of nature,” said Yongxiang Huang, lead author of the study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Physics of Fluids. Huang is a researcher of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science & College of Ocean and Earth Sciences at Xiamen University in southeast China.

“The Starry Night” is an oil on canvas painting that the study has identified as depicting a pre-dawn view from the east-facing window of the artist’s retreat in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence south of France. Van Gogh had taken refuge there after cutting off his left ear.

Using a digital image of the image, Huang and his colleagues analyzed the size of its 14 large circular shapes to understand whether they corresponded to physical theories that explain the transfer of energy to from large to small as they collide and interact with each other. one.

‘The Starry Night’ and theories of chaos

The movement of a painted sky can’t be measured directly, so Huang and his colleagues measured the brushstrokes precisely and compared the size of the brushstrokes to the expected numerical scale. from chaotic theories. In order to measure the movement of the body, they used relative brightness or the brightness of different colors of paint.

They discovered that the size of the 14 whirls or eddies in “The Starry Night,” and their relative location and strength, follow a natural law governing the dynamics of water known as Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence.

In the 1940s, Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov described a mathematical relationship between the rate of change in flow rate and the rate at which its energy dissipates.

Huang and team also found that the paint, on a very small scale, mixed with the back and forth turbulence predicted by turbulence theory, according to a statistical method known as Batchelor’s scaling. . Batchelor’s scaling numerically represents how small particles, such as drifting algae in the ocean or particles of dust in the air, are mixed around by turbulent flow.

“This is interesting. This is exactly the kind of statistics you would expect when algae blooms are washed away by ocean currents, or dust and particles in the air,” said James Beattie, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of of astronomy at Princeton University in New Jersey, email Beattie was not involved in the research but has conducted similar research on the art.

“In my paper, I only looked at the big ones (swirls in the picture), so I didn’t see this second relationship,” he said, referring to Batchelor’s rise.

Of course, Huang said, van Gogh would not have known about such figures, but it is possible that he spent a lot of time looking at chaos in nature.

“I think that this physical relationship must be embedded in his mind and that’s why when he created this famous image of ‘Starry Night’, it imitates the real flow,” Huang said.

Beattie agreed: “It’s amazing that a good Van Gogh painting shares the same statistics as a riot,” he said.

“This makes sense – the models are designed to try to capture the statistics of eddies and swirls at multiple scales, each interacting with other currents in the vortex. In a way, Van Gogh painted something that represents this event, so why shouldn’t there be a transition between the theoretical and statistical models of Van Gogh’s swirls?

The research team conducted a similar analysis and found the same scene in two other paintings, one of which is the painting, “Chain Pier, Brighton,” by British painter John Constable in 1826- 7, and the other is a photograph of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, taken by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft on March 5, 1979.

“Unlike ‘Starry Night,’ this image does not have a clear pattern around it, but the clouds have many structures with different layers, similar to what is often seen in the sky,” The survey noted Constable’s artwork.

On display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “The Starry Night” is a well-known work of art recreated from Lego bricks, drones and dominoes.

Huang said that scientists have long struggled to explain the massive flow of liquid in a way that would allow them to predict the phenomenon and that the full explanation is still a mystery in physics. A better understanding could help with weather forecasting, aviation turbulence and many other applications, he said.

“Even after more than 100 years (of) study, we don’t know how to explain this complex phenomenon,” Huang said. “It’s very important, but it’s very difficult.”

The fact that “The Starry Night” conforms to statistical models of chaos even when the images are motionless may suggest that statistical methods and tools are less accurate than scientists thought, Beattie said. he said.

The picture cannot be measured properly because “it is not really a mess. … (I) have no kinetic energy,” he said.

However, Beattie said he was a big fan of the artwork and that it reflected the universality and beauty of chaos.

He said: “I like the fact that I can take my understanding of plasma turbulence between galaxies and apply it to turbulence between stars, between the Earth and the Sun or in our lakes, oceans and the atmosphere.

“What I take from studies like this is that (van Gogh) has captured some of the beauty of the universe (‘Starry Night’),” Beattie added. “And I think people know this. They know that there is something wonderful put into this image and we are attracted to it.”