As someone who studies and visualizes turbulent (well, turbulent-like) flow phenomena on a daily basis, I completely agree with your (and Martin’s) points.
But at the same time, there is a tendency, certainly in the popular press/culture, to mythologize genius (or madness ;-), which in this case would be the idea that van Gogh could somehow “see” or intuit the *precise* nature of a fundamental physical principle decades before it was understood.
The -5/3 power law is not like, say, the Golden ratio. I can imagine that if you asked someone to draw a “pleasing” rectangle there’s a good chance they’d come close to a Golden rectangle without knowing (or needing to know) why. On the other hand, if you asked a trained fluid mechanician to crudely sketch an eddy cascade that specifically obeys the -5/3 power law, chances are it won’t come close.
Now, I don’t know the author of the paper I posted (also a Canadian, but a 3-hour flight away ;-) or what prompted him to write it, but I suppose that if I were at a dinner party and told, wide-eyed, that van Gogh could somehow “see" Kolmogorov’s -5/3 power law decades before it was discovered, when I know this requires fairly good analytical skills to tease out of visualizations or data, I too might be tempted to question it.
Personally, I remain drawn (haha) to Leonardo’s flow visualizations, and still marvel at how he got them so damned right, even though I know there are probably little devils hiding in the details.
/das.
As a scientist myself having studied fluid mechanics during undergraduate and graduate studies, I do not understand the "need" to perform this scientific study, which, as Martin and others pointed out, ignores not only the history and the context, and the very art itself. Agree with Brigitte/David on the wonder of Van Gogh and turbulence :)
Yep! I think David is right to stress: “it doesn’t diminish my sense of wonder about either Van Gogh or turbulence” – BOTH!
Brigitte
David,
Typical of contemporary scientists' misapplication of their modern criteria to historic art without doing the slightest historical due diligence (both the original paper and this one). I get this all the time with Leonardo.
My postdoc spotted this paper, and I thought you might “enjoy" as an interesting response to what was clearly perceived as an over-interpretation of the science in art and of the scientific intuition of artists.
I wonder what he’d make of Hokusai (or, in Pythonese, "Lucky I didn't say anything about the dirty knife.” :-)
As for me, it doesn’t diminish my sense of wonder about either Van Gogh or turbulence, and it puts me in mind of one of my favourite (ironic) quotes: "Pedagogical simplicity is inevitably achieved at some cost of verisimilitude.” [Holmes, in Tauber’s “Beautiful Experiments in the Life Sciences”]
/das.
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Martin Kemp
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