New Scientific Study Reveals that Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ is scientifically accurate.
Credit: Shutterstock, spatuletail
New Scientific Study Reveals that Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ is scientifically accurate.
Apparently, Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ is not only one of art’s great masterpieces, but it is also scientifically accurate.
Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ has inspired poetry, theatre, books, and even legendary artists like the iconic Tupac Shakur and Don Mclean.
If that wasn’t enough, a recent scientific study has finally revealed that Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ is not just an artistic masterpiece but also a scientifically accurate depiction of atmospheric turbulence.
Van Gogh’s brushstrokes are so effective at conveying movement that they encouraged researchers to wonder just how closely they reflect the actual physics of the sky. And when they looked closer, they found that his painting mirrors the behaviour of atmospheric turbulence.
It turns out that the swirling brushstrokes on the canvas match the turbulence dynamics of real-world physics, suggesting that Van Gogh may have had an innate understanding of natural atmospheric motion.
French and Chinese scientists carried out the research using high definition images of the original painting, and the findings were published in the Physics of Fluids journal.
What Did They Find?
Turbulence in the Painting:
If inspiring people worldwide for over a hundred years wasn’t enough, Van Gogh somehow managed to align the scale and pacing of his brush with something called cascading energy, one of the telltale signs of atmospheric turbulence. How he managed to do this in 1889 is simply extraordinary, but rest assured, Ancient Aliens will get to the bottom of this. The swirls weren’t just pretty, they followed the rules of physics.
To make things even more intriguing, scientists used high-resolution digital images of Starry Night and discovered that Van Gogh’s portrayal of the swirling sky matches up with a concept called Kolmogorov’s law, which explains how energy moves in turbulent flows, from larger objects to smaller ones.
How Did Van Gogh Do It?
It’s hard to say exactly how Van Gogh managed to achieve such scientific accuracy in his depiction of the sky. Some speculate that his bouts of mental illness – he was famously admitted to a psychiatric hospital after cutting off part of his own ear – may have played a role in how he saw the world. Others believe he was communicating with aliens, but we’ll leave that story for another day.
In all seriousness though, Van Gogh, it seems, was more than just an artist; he was a 19th century scientist of the skies.
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PS: If you enjoyed this article, you might also like to read about this 12-year-old boy who found a 2000-year-old Roman bracelet while walking his dog, or this 60-million-year-old fish thought to be extinct, but that was found alive and well in a pond.
