[imagesource:wonderai]

It’s well known that Van Gogh was a bit of a mad genius, yet the painter managed to visualise a phenomenon in his Starry Night artwork that was only scientifically validated almost 100 years later.

The story behind one of the world’s most viewed paintings is well known. After his infamous ear-cutting incident, Van Gogh painted Starry Night while being held under psychiatric observation at an asylum in France (as a side note, there is a theory that his mate, Paul Gauguin actually cut his ear off in a drunken sword fight in the dark).

Whilst ‘under observation’, the master painted his most iconic works, which depict a 125-year-old scientific secret – turbulence.

Turbulence, or turbulent flow, is a concept of fluid dynamics where fluid movements are self-similar – basically, big eddies (a circular movement of water causing a small whirlpool) make smaller eddies, which in turn makes even smaller eddies.

This phenomenon has only recently become clear to scientists, yet if we look at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, it’s clear that the painter intentionally incorporated this turbulence into his work. The nature of this ‘eddie flow’ has only now become accepted by scientists studying star turbulence – which is clearly depicted in the 1889 painting.

Van Gogh also seems to be the only artist of his time who could accurately capture the movement of star turbulence as most of his peers only depicted ‘luminance’ (the appearance of a pulsing glow) when painting the night sky.

Starry Night might just be the splashing of a one-eared madman in a French asylum, but, strangely, Van Gogh managed to capture something so distinct in his work that it showed up in Hubble Space Telescope observations a century later.

If you struggle to marry art with mathematical turbulence, here’s a video explaining the beautiful mess:

[source:upworthy]