Vincent Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night' accurately depicts turbulent flow, even though the artist was unfamiliar with the science behind it.

Turbulent flow is responsible for the rapid scattering of dandelion seeds, volcanic ash, and untied balloons. Its swirling behavior accelerates particle scattering faster than other mixing methods, as particles acquire energy from the interactions of eddies.

Despite being the most common type of fluid flow in our world, scientists have struggled to model turbulent flow accurately. Though behaving unpredictably, understanding inertia and viscosity can help determine whether turbulence will occur.

Jackson Pollock is one of the most famous American artists in history. He is well-known for his Abstract Expressionist "drip paintings," which seemed to defy interpretation. But following the artist's posthumous bipolar diagnosis, a team of scientists attempted to prove that his symptoms, including mania and psychosis, caused Pollock to embed images under his thrown paint.

Van Gogh’s painting titled “Irises” (1889) remains one of his most-recognized works. Created soon after the artist checked himself into an asylum, the oil painting depicts flowers from the overgrown garden in the institution. Discover more about the work and other masterpieces Van Gogh constructed during a personally tumultuous time.

Caspar David Friedrich’s painting portrays man’s fascination with the natural world and emphasizes his smallness in the midst of its grandeur, epitomizing Edmund Burke's concept of "the sublime."

Helene Muri, a meteorologist at the University of Oslo, believes the clouds causing the man such terror are nacreous. "We do know that there were mother-of-pearl clouds in the Oslo area in the late 19th century," she said, though she was careful to note that it was still a hypothesis.

A century after researchers suggested he suffered from epilepsy, some researchers in the 1990s began to support an alternate diagnosis: Ménière's disease, since he had suffered from severe, repeated attacks of disabling vertigo. Still, some researchers remain skeptical of the Ménière's diagnosis. One posits that Van Gogh had temporal epilepsy complicated by his absinthe consumption.

Previously used to map the distribution of molecules on biological tissue samples, researchers combined the technique with machine learning to uncover six layers of pigments, binders, and a thin gold leaf layer within The Marriage of the Virgin, from a collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The technique may help identify and track artists' material use to learn about pieces of unknown provenance.

Using a dye released in the water, streamlines, which are parallel to one another and consistent at low flow velocities, become visible. As the water moves more quickly, viscosity cannot suppress the velocity change, and streamlines become chaotic, creating turbulence.

Within simulations of these clouds, gravity, jets, supernovae, and galactic motion-induced stirring have been shown to develop turbulence that creates shocks. These turbulent shocks move quickly in low-density regions and slow in high-density areas, forming lumps of matter with sufficient gravitational force to collapse and initiate fusion, birthing a star.

The discovery of chaos theory came from Edward Lorenz's computer model of the atmosphere, which used three equations to quantify atmospheric circulation. However, the chaotic evolution of this system creates wandering figure-8-like shapes—some resembling butterfly wings—as it repeatedly attempts to settle on one of two values along unique trajectories.

Repeated visual cues like shapes or lines derive from the brain's innate compulsion to identify faces, places, bodies, and more. With repeated shapes, the brain seeks out resolution to the subtle variations between them. See examples in art and music.

While Japanese art is diverse and continues to adopt new styles and techniques, the Japanese approach to painting nature inspired Georgia O’Keeffe, who was known for depicting the environment in a detailed yet realistic manner. Below is "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," from 1931, by Hokusai.

As energy is lost in fluids undergoing turbulent, non-linear flow, particles will collectively form eddies, or whirlpools, of various sizes that mix together. The energy cascade of larger eddies becoming smaller ones before dissipating completely varies based on the initial conditions of the fluid, a characteristic feature of chaotic systems.

Astrophotographers specialize in collecting as much light from celestial objects as possible while minimizing the movement of the object they're capturing. It's a unique skillset—requiring unique tools—but the results are often universally...

- Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

By accidentally finding that rounding one variable to its third decimal place and re-running a weather simulation produced a drastically different two-month forecast, the American mathematician established the field of chaos theory. His paper—"Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?"—introduced the well-known metaphor for the behavior of chaotic systems.

JMW Turner was a prominent member of the Romantic movement, known for his expressive, colorful, and threatening paintings of coastal and marine scenes. Later in his career, he pushed his style to more intense colors and abstract forms, inspiring and preceding the abstract art movements, like Impressionism.

The world's most famous painting is missing something. And it took centuries for experts to figure out what. In this episode, August Moon investigates what happened to the Mona Lisa's eyebrows—analyzing infrared scans, tracking 500 years of restoration, and examining a forgotten copy from Leonardo's studio. But he uncovers something bigger: what we lost after the 1911 theft that has nothing to do with the painting leaving the Louvre.

In biology, some mathematical models of ecosystem populations and heart irregularities show strong sensitivity to initial conditions, which scientists can simulate to determine quantitative tipping points at which these systems become unstable. Within the social sciences, crowd behavior and the virality of social media posts have shown how human behavior fits within the framework of chaos theory.

Simulations show patches of fluid particles, such as splashes of milk, bend under turbulent flow, creating curvature that grows linearly then exponentially. This accelerated deformation enhances folding and mixing faster than other methods, such as stirring or beating.

For much of Western art history, the definition of “beauty” in art was dictated by academies rather than personal taste. Artists like Picasso challenged these standards with works considered “ugly” for discarding anatomical accuracy or linear perspective in favor of a feeling.

Stokes waves—a solution to the mathematics of water waves—were once assumed to be stable. Italian mathematicians have proven disturbances cause these waves to collapse and such collapses follow an infinite repeating pattern. To complete the proof, the team offered a $100 donation to solicit online help.

The Persistence of Memory was painted on a canvas roughly the size of a sheet of paper, depicting a desolate landscape with melting clocks, ants, and a distorted figure. The piece incorporates Freud and Einstein's ideas, resulting in a haunting composition symbolizing time's fluidity and Dalí's personal anxieties.

Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s art uses vast, massive scale and masterful compositions to convey complex ideas of power, decay, permanence, and more. But his landscapes also present beautiful, overwhelming portraits of nature that perfectly embody philosopher Edmund Burke’s concept of “the sublime.”

According to a curator at a German museum, an abstract painting by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been displayed upside down for seventy-seven years at a number of museums.

Astronomy is the only science that is purely observational: meaning, scientists can't study stars in a lab. Here's a breakdown of how modern researchers use new tools to understand objects billions of light years away. As it turns out, the rules of science allow us to identify, categorize, and experiment with phenomena light years away.

The author of "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" was a romantic poet and painter. "Newton," one of his better-known pieces, satirizes Isaac Newton, whom he saw as too concerned with the empiricism of science and, as a result, lacking an understanding of nature.

The theory explains that systems following well-understood physical laws can still produce unpredictable outcomes due to small variations in their initial conditions. Originally identified in weather data, elements of chaos have been observed in stock market fluctuations, cardiac arrhythmias, and the evolution of online social movements.

Rockwell’s work was often noted for its realism. His paintings' near-photographic precision was no accident. Early in his career, he painted from live models. Later, he’d conceived a scene, staged it, photographed it, and then used the photos as the foundation for his paintings.

Various geometric models, including Newton's color circle of hue and saturation and the horseshoe-shaped XYZ space for mixing colors via vector mathematics, have been proposed to describe colors accurately. However, these models do not encapsulate the variety of psychological effects that cause perceived colors to differ from mathematical representations.

Theoretical cosmologist Kip Thorne was consulted and collaborated with the film's visual effects team to develop new rendering software, integrate general relativity, and generate ultra-high-resolution visuals. The results were so accurate, they were published in scientific journals.

While depictions involving bends in elastic fabrics are common to illustrate gravity, they are circular representations that rely on gravity in the real world to depict gravity in the model. The river model instead shows how bends in spacetime convert speed through time into speed through space, producing acceleration.