These days, people who claim to have heightened perceptions seem to be more appreciated by a wide audience on social media, for better and for worse. Occasionally, objective scientists come to fully acknowledge and appreciate people with perceptions beyond scientific explanation. For example, researchers are crediting the world-famous Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh with having an unexplainable ability to paint unseen atmospheric physics.

The artist captured something remarkable in the “language of painting,” which is now being verified with mathematics.

“I think art has the capacity to capture truth just like science does,” astrophysicist Adam Frank said about the news. “I think that Van Gogh was responding intuitively, emotionally to what he was seeing in the sky and was therefore recapturing those patterns that a detailed mathematical analysis would also find,” he continued.

How did Van Gogh do it? It’s unknowable, but he apparently did have an innate or intuitive understanding of turbulence in the air. And if so, could we also tune into an innate understanding of the mathematics behind what we perceive? Or was this ability unique to the artist?

Vincent van Gogh and a Famous Celestial Scene

Just by saying the artist’s name, you probably think of his painting, The Starry Night, done in 1889. It’s art history’s “most famous celestial scene,” according to Artnet.

Van Gogh painted beautiful swirls in the sky, which have always been assumed to be part of the post-impressionist style or attributed to mental illness. He painted it in an asylum right after cutting off part of his earlobe, after all. But as Artnet shared, those swirls are “remarkably accurate” to the mathematics of actual atmospheric dynamics.

Could Van Gogh actually see the swirls? Well, in the case of The Starry Night, he worked in a windowless studio at the time, but a quote reveals he fully intended to reveal a glimpse of life’s hidden intricacy to others.

“To me, the worth of my art lies in its power to reverberate with others and to reveal a glimpse into the splendor and intricacy of life itself,” he wrote (see video below).

According to Arnet, he likely took inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints such as the swirling patterns of Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. It’s likewise a world-famous work of art that resonates strongly today. Maybe this artist also had an intuitive interpretation of fluid dynamics?

Van Gogh’s Brushstrokes Aligned with Physics

However, Van Gogh did it; he precisely depicted the fluid dynamics of the air. Rather than merely decorative swirls, the scientists found that his brushstrokes matched the scale and kinetic energy patterns of the atmosphere.

“The paper concluded that overall the painting aligns with Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence, which predicts atmospheric movement and scale based on the amount of energy involved. The paper was, lead author Yongxiang Huang said, somewhat in response to previous studies on The Starry Night. The first in 2006 had caught his attention as a PhD candidate and claimed the work showed perfect turbulence. A further two in 2019 and 2020 questioned the finding. This latest study somewhat closes the case,” wrote Artnet.

Hidden Turbulence Revealed with Paint

According to the paper published in Physics of Fluids, the carefully analyzed brushstrokes were shockingly accurate to Kolmogorov’s law of 1940, a law of motion-fueled energy all the way down to the smallest whirls, which suggested a “hidden turbulence” in the painting. Thus, it was not merely coincidence.

“This result suggests that van Gogh had a very careful observation of real flows, so that not only the sizes of whirls/eddies in The Starry Night but also their relative distances and intensity follow the physical law that governs turbulent flows. Moreover, a “–1”-like power-law persists in the spectrum below the scales of the smallest whirls, hinting at Batchelor-type scalar turbulence with a high Schmidt number. Our study, thus, unveils the hidden turbulence captured within The Starry Night,” the abstract states.

A New Way of Seeing Van Gogh

Along with precisely and inexplicably depicting atmospheric physics somehow, the artist also accurately placed a glowing Venus, along with the constellations Capella, Cassiopeia, and Pegasus, as would be seen at 4 am on June 19, 1889. Using the latest new paints, he was able to create a luminous, flickering effect that gives the painting a swirling energy.

You can feel the energy, and we can easily imagine that he did too.

Suddenly, world-famous artwork takes on a whole new level of appreciation from scientists or anyone. Did he have some kind of heightened sense or merely his intuition? As shared before, there are a few rare folks who say they see the underlying geometry of the world around them in extraordinary ways.

Video by NBC about the new scientific insights into Van Gogh’s painting:

Revelations About the Artist Continue

In a previous Paris exhibit from 2023, Revelation, an AI avatar of the artist conversed with visitors to answer questions, such as why he ended his life at age 37. It remains a mystery, but the revelations keep coming today.

In a letter with his brother Theo, he discussed another mystery: what happens when we leave this mathematical illusion called life. For him, it wasn’t the end but a change in perspective, one that would bring him closer to the stars he painted near the end of his time here.

“But the sight of the stars always makes me dream… Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star,” he wrote to his brother Theo. 

If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or are experiencing a mental health crisis, dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.

Video by CBS Sunday Morning about the Van Gogh exhibit in Paris:

More from AP News about the Van Gogh exhibit in Paris:

Featured image: Van Gogh – Starry Night/Wikimedia Commons with Vincent van Gogh – Self-Portrait – 1954.326 – Art Institute of Chicago/Wikimedia Commons