Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night has captivated audiences for over a century with its swirling colors and emotional depth. However, a recent scientific analysis has uncovered a new layer to the painting’s brilliance, revealing that Van Gogh may have intuitively captured complex atmospheric physics.
Researchers from China and France analyzed the painting’s swirling patterns and compared them to known models of turbulence in the atmosphere. Their study, published in the journal Physics of Fluids, suggests that the shapes in Starry Night mirror the behavior of turbulence, which occurs when differences in temperature disrupt the atmosphere, altering the movement of water vapor and even light.
The scientists used Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence, which explains how energy cascades from large-scale movements to smaller ones. They found that the 14 main swirls in the painting align with this theory, suggesting that Van Gogh had a sophisticated understanding of natural phenomena. According to study co-author Yongxiang Huang, this analysis reveals “a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena.”
But the research didn’t stop at shapes. The team also examined the relative brightness, or luminance, of the colors in Starry Night, using it as a stand-in for the kinetic energy involved in physical movements. This allowed them to further analyze how Van Gogh depicted the transfer of energy on a small scale, leading them to discover that the colors align with Batchelor’s scaling—a concept in physics that describes energy transfer at the smallest levels of turbulence.
Seeing both Kolmogorov’s theory and Batchelor’s scaling come to life in the painting was a rare and exciting find for the researchers. According to them, it is uncommon to observe these two concepts simultaneously in real atmospheric conditions, let alone in a painting.
The question remains: how did Van Gogh come to understand and depict such complex physics? Huang speculates that Van Gogh may have studied the movement of clouds and the atmosphere in detail or had an innate sense of how to convey the sky’s dynamism. Regardless, the ability to represent turbulence so precisely in a work of art, especially one painted in 1889, is an astonishing feat.
For art lovers, this scientific discovery adds yet another reason to admire Starry Night. It’s not only a masterpiece of post-impressionist emotion but also an unintentional depiction of the hidden physics that govern the natural world.
