Accurately depicting the physics of turbulence was likely the last thing on Vincent Van Gogh’s mind when he painted The Starry Night in 1889. But more than 135 years later, that captivating swirl of stars has sparked debate among experts in mechanical engineering.
A group including the University of Alberta’s Warren Finlay — founding director of the Aerosol Research Laboratory of Alberta — has taken issue with a 2024 study that claims The Starry Night “accurately depicts the intrinsic and complex structure of real, fully developed turbulent flows.”
In a recently published rebuttal, Finlay et al. argue Van Gogh’s masterpiece fails to represent turbulence “as understood in fluid mechanics ... outlined in Andrey Kolmogorov’s famous −5/3 law.” To make their point, the authors compare The Starry Night with Edgar Degas’s A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers, demonstrating that you could point to any number of paintings to come up with the same insufficient evidence published by the authors of the 2024 study.
The great Dutch master may have been shocked to hear it, but according to the experts, it seems he did not, after all, possess a “unique gift for perceiving and representing turbulent flow.”