Van Gogh’s Starry Night Reveals Hidden Scientific Patterns—Here's What Physicists Say

Vincent Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night,' may have been painted in 1889, but experts in all fields are still studying it until now—and something phenomenal has been revealed.

In a new study published in the Physics of Fluids journal, physicists found that the iconic artist applied "atmospheric turbulence" in the painting at a microscale level, alluding to Van Gogh's "deep and intuitive understanding" of cloud movements and atmosphere made through paint strokes.

It's worth noting that any "turbulence" in Physics, which are chaotic and sudden movements of air or water that lead them to swirl in patterns like vortices, was not fully understood until 1940. In the same year, Kolmogorov's Law by a Russian physicist explained the said turbulence, which is 51 years after The Starry Night was created.

Long before the study was published, Ars Technica shared that a Concord Consortium's research associate and The Art of Mental Calculator author sampled Starry Night to show the "concept of turbulence in a flowing fluid." Impressionist painters later learned to paint the movement of light when touching waters or stars, thanks to Gogh's technique. This is the "shimmering effect" we see on twinkling stars since our eyes are more sensitive to light intensity or luminance than colors.

Van Gogh's Starry Night Depicting 'Turbulence' in Fluid Dynamics

In the same Ars Technica report, Starry Night was already analyzed in 2019 and was found to resemble the swirling patterns in molecular clouds, which shows similarities to Kolmogorov's Law. This Van Gogh technique was used in some of his works too, including the Wheatfield with Crows.

Aside from the law, Science Daily noted that other researchers saw that Starry Night was aligned with Batchelor's scaling, which explains the smaller fluctuations of swirls of energy before diffusion dominates. The presence of these two, one physics and one mathematics concept, in one element is rare. This adds to the idea that Van Gogh has a natural instinct to capture turbulence, with many of his paintings expected to help advance modern understanding of fluid dynamics.