Physicists discover Van Gogh's famous painting depicts physical phenomena with astonishing accuracy
A study of Vincent van Gogh's masterpiece 'The Starry Night' from the perspective of fluid dynamics has revealed that the vortices depicted in the sky obey the laws of physics.
Hidden turbulence in van Gogh's The Starry Night | Physics of Fluids | AIP Publishing
This Famous Van Gogh Painting Features Astonishingly Accurate Physics : ScienceAlert
Beneath the brushstrokes, van Gogh's sky is a | EurekAlert!
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1057862
Yingshan Ma, a marine environmental scientist at Xiamen University, and his colleagues examined 14 of the major vortices depicted in 'Starry Night' to see whether Van Gogh's brushstrokes matched up with a phenomenon known as an 'energy cascade' -- a transfer of energy from large-scale turbulence to smaller-scale turbulence that can also be seen in the atmosphere.
By analyzing the brushstrokes using high-resolution digital images and further capturing the relative brightness of the paint colors, Ma and his colleagues found that Van Gogh's vortexes met the requirements of a theory called the Kolmogorov law , which describes energy cascades.
Previous research had shown that eddies satisfy the requirements of Kolmogorov's law, but this time, by examining the fine print, they were found to match the power spectrum of a scalar defined by Australian mathematician George Batchelor in 1959. Batchelor argued that scalars, the scale components of turbulence, i.e. eddies of different sizes, should exhibit a power spectrum corresponding to their size.
'Our analysis suggests that Van Gogh observed the movement of the atmosphere very carefully, and that not only the size of the vortices and whirlpools, but also their relative distance and strength obey the physical laws governing turbulence,' said Marr and his colleagues. 'Van Gogh's accurate depiction of turbulence may have been the result of studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere, or it may have been an innate instinct. Either way, Van Gogh's understanding of natural physics may have been deeper than we thought.'
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