The Hidden Physics In Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: To close out the hour, we’re going to turn to one of Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous creations, Starry Night. You might already be seeing it in your head, an oil painting of a quaint French village with a blue night sky that dramatically swirls around the yellow stars and moon. It’s easy to admire this painting as a casual viewer, but if you research fluid dynamics, one thing in particular stands out. Those iconic swirls in the sky, to a physicist, they look an awful lot like the swirls atmospheric turbulence produces.

Well, a team of researchers from China and France set out to analyze all the swirls in Starry Night to see if they match the mathematical models of turbulence theory. It turns out that Van Gogh had a knack for depicting the forces of nature.

Here to tell us about the hidden physics in this famous painting is my guest Dr. Francois Schmitt, research professor in physics at the French National Center for Scientific Research. He was part of that research team, and their results were published in the journal Physics of Fluids. Dr. Schmitt, welcome to Science Friday.

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Hello.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: So there’s been some debate about the swirling in the painting in physics circles for years now, and it revolves around something called Kolmogorov’s law, which predicts how the atmosphere swirls and forms eddies. Did you find that Starry Night lines up with what the law predicts?

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Yes, exactly that. The result of our study was to find that Kolmogorov law was quite nicely followed by the eddies and the swirls that were in the painting of Van Gogh. There was a debate in the community about this painting and to know if it follows Kolmogorov law and the swirls and the eddies are following this law. What we have done differently is simply to take into account all the eddies in the painting.

So there are 14 eddies in the painting, and previous studies have considering only a part of this painting with only five eddies. So the main difference for us was to consider all the eddies.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Right. So we know that Van Gogh spent a lot of time in nature painting nature, and I guess the big question here was was he so good at observing nature that even some of the elements in his paintings actually mirrored the atmospheric turbulence on a mathematical level.

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Yes, exactly. Of course, he did not know any mathematics, and the Kolmogorov flow was found much later. But still he was able, with his artistic eye to reproduce, in fact, some of the properties of turbulence.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Let’s talk a little bit about that. So for the lay audience, what exactly are we talking about when we say atmospheric turbulence?

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Yeah, turbulence in physics, in fluid mechanics, it’s used to describe chaotic motion, and it applies to ocean. It applies to the atmosphere and, in fact, also to the clouds.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: So how did you go about trying to figure out if the painting actually matches the fluid mechanics?

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: The first step was to remove in the painting all that was not atmosphere. So there is a village. There is a landscape. So all this was removed, and then only the atmospheric part was kept. And then the color information was transformed into a luminance information. And then we used a very high resolution image, and we analyzed it as a numerical quantity.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Cool. So basically you equated the brightness of the colors in the paintings with energy, and you measured the shapes and sizes of the brushstrokes. And when you plugged that data into an algorithm, it aligned with the types of swirls and eddies we see naturally in the atmosphere.

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Yes, exactly. it’s a statistical analysis. So, in fact, globally, not each eddy follows the turbulence, but globally the statistics of the eddies correspond to this Kolmogorov flow.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: It’s so incredible. Were you surprised that the swirls did follow these atmospheric models?

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: It was very surprising because in the same analysis, we see two flows of turbulence. One is this Kolmogorov flow for the eddies, for the swirls, and the other one is the effect of the oil mixing in the painting, which is called the [INAUDIBLE]. So we see both flows in the same analysis, and we were really surprised by seeing this.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Does this give you an even greater appreciation for Van Gogh as an artist after doing this research?

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Yes, definitely because turbulence is something which is very complex. In fact, it obeys some equation that still are not solved mathematically. It’s a subjective impression, and hidden math is something which is more objective. But what we have tried to do here is to have a mixture between these subjectivity and objectivity. So it’s a meeting of art and science.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Do you have any thoughts about why Van Gogh might have in particular been able to see the world in this way?

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Perhaps he had some other way to see the world because you know that he was a little, how to say, perturbed, so he perhaps we can say he had another conscience level. Perhaps it gave him some abilities to do what he has done.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Yes, he lived a very turbulent life. So maybe it allowed him to see the turbulence in the atmosphere as well.

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s a good way to make the link between the two.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. This research is fascinating.

FRANCOIS SCHMITT: Thanks a lot.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Dr. Francois Schmitt, research professor in physics at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

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