In the 1940s, a Russian mathematician named Andrey Kolmogorov laid out an important law of fluid dynamics that explains how energy moves through air and water, per Smithsonian Magazine. But if "Kolmogorov's theory of turbulence" sounds a little dense, you could instead cast a glance at Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, painted decades before the mathematician had his breakthrough in the 1940s, reports CNN. The artist expressed the theory perfectly in his oil painting that features a sky of swirling blue and gold, according to French and Chinese physicists whose study is published in the journal Physics of Fluids.
"Imagine you are standing on a bridge, and you watch the river flow," lead author Yongxiang Huang of Xiamen University in China tells CNN. "You will see swirls on the surface, and these swirls are not random. They arrange themselves in specific patterns, and these kinds of patterns can be predicted by physical laws." After studying Van Gogh's painting, Huang's team concluded that his swirling sky aligns with these physical laws, even if they wouldn't be articulated until long after he was dead.
The painting "reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena," says Huang in a statement. "Van Gogh's precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky." The artist painted it while at a psychiatric facility he'd checked himself into after mutilating his own ear. (More Vincent Van Gogh stories.)
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