1
00:00:13,430 --> 00:00:16,413
One of the most remarkable aspects
of the human brain

2
00:00:16,413 --> 00:00:17,455
is its ability to recognize patterns
and describe them.

3
00:00:17,455 --> 00:00:18,695
Among the hardest patterns
we've tried to undestand

4
00:00:18,695 --> 00:00:20,789
is the concept of
turbulent flow in fluid dynamics.

5
00:00:20,789 --> 00:00:23,296
The German physicists 
Verner Heisenberg said,

6
00:00:23,296 --> 00:00:27,381
"When I meet God, I'm going to ask him
two questions:

7
00:00:27,381 --> 00:00:30,842
why relativity and why turbulence?

8
00:00:30,842 --> 00:00:34,932
I really believe he will have 
an answer for the first."

9
00:00:34,932 --> 00:00:38,304
As difficult as turbulence is to
understand mathematically,

10
00:00:38,304 --> 00:00:42,194
we can use art to depict the way it looks.

11
00:00:42,194 --> 00:00:47,308
In June 1889, Vincent Van Gogh painted
the view just before sunrise

12
00:00:47,308 --> 00:00:51,659
from the window of his room at the
Saint Paul de Mausole Asylumn

13
00:00:51,659 --> 00:00:53,588
in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

14
00:00:53,588 --> 00:00:56,840
where he'd admitted himself after
mutilating his own ear

15
00:00:56,840 --> 00:00:59,312
in a psychotic epidosde.

16
00:00:59,312 --> 00:01:02,056
In the Starry Night, 
his circular brush strokes

17
00:01:02,056 --> 00:01:07,827
creates a night sky filled with
swirling clouds eddies of stars.

18
00:01:07,827 --> 00:01:11,748
Van Gogh and other impressionists
represented light in a different way

19
00:01:11,748 --> 00:01:14,872
than their predecessors,seeming to
capture its motion,

20
00:01:14,872 --> 00:01:17,860
for instance, across sun dappled waters,

21
00:01:17,860 --> 00:01:21,530
or here in star light that 
twinkles and melts

22
00:01:21,530 --> 00:01:24,844
through milky waves of blue night sky.

23
00:01:24,844 --> 00:01:27,415
The effect is caused my luminance,

24
00:01:27,415 --> 00:01:31,104
the intensity of the light in the colors 
on the canvas.

25
00:01:31,104 --> 00:01:33,632
The more primitive part of our
visual cortex,

26
00:01:33,632 --> 00:01:37,578
which sees light contrast and motion,
but not color,

27
00:01:37,578 --> 00:01:40,627
will blend two differently colored areas
together

28
00:01:40,627 --> 00:01:42,493
if they have the same luminance.

29
00:01:42,493 --> 00:01:45,352
But our brains primate
subdivision

30
00:01:45,352 --> 00:01:48,506
will see the contrasting colors
without blending.

31
00:01:48,506 --> 00:01:51,457
With these two interpretations
happening at once,

32
00:01:51,457 --> 00:01:57,898
the light in many impressionists' works
seems to pulse, flicker and radiate oddly.

33
00:01:57,898 --> 00:02:01,489
That's how this and other impressionists' 
works use quickly executted

34
00:02:01,489 --> 00:02:05,163
prominent brush strokes to capture
something strikingly real

35
00:02:05,163 --> 00:02:07,533
about how light moves.

36
00:02:07,533 --> 00:02:11,206
60 years later, Russian mathematician
Andrey Kolmogorov,

37
00:02:11,206 --> 00:02:13,787
furthered our mathematical understanding
of turbulence

38
00:02:13,787 --> 00:02:18,157
when he proposed that energy in a
turbulent fluid at length R

39
00:02:18,157 --> 00:02:22,491
varies in proportion to 
the 5/3rds power of R.

40
00:02:22,491 --> 00:02:24,414
Experimental measurements
show Kolmogorov

41
00:02:24,414 --> 00:02:27,804
was remarkably close to the 
way turbulent flow works.

42
00:02:27,804 --> 00:02:30,441
Although a complete description of
turbulence remains

43
00:02:30,441 --> 00:02:33,304
one of the unsolved problems in physics,

44
00:02:33,304 --> 00:02:37,515
a turbuletn flow is self-similar
if there is an energy cascade.

45
00:02:37,515 --> 00:02:41,123
In ther words, big eddies
transfer their energy to smaller eddies,

46
00:02:41,123 --> 00:02:43,941
which do likewise at other scales.

47
00:02:43,941 --> 00:02:47,504
Examples of this include Jupiter's
great red spot,

48
00:02:47,504 --> 00:02:51,408
cloud formations and
interstellar dust particles.

49
00:02:51,408 --> 00:02:54,909
In 2004, using the Hubble space telescope,


50
00:02:54,909 --> 00:03:00,171
scientists saw the eddies of a distant
cloud of dust and gas around a star,

51
00:03:00,171 --> 00:03:03,842
and it reminded them of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

52
00:03:03,842 --> 00:03:07,193
This motivated scientists from Mexico, 
Spain and England

53
00:03:07,193 --> 00:03:11,387
to study the luminence in Van Gogh's
paintings in detail.

54
00:03:11,387 --> 00:03:15,700
They discovered that there is a distinct
pattern of turbulent fluid structures

55
00:03:15,700 --> 00:03:20,801
close to Kolmogorov's equation
hidden in many of Van Gogh's paintings.

56
00:03:20,801 --> 00:03:23,224
The researchers digitized the paintings,

57
00:03:23,224 --> 00:03:26,970
and measured how brightness varies between
any two pixels.

58
00:03:26,970 --> 00:03:29,689
From the curves measured for
pixel separations,

59
00:03:29,689 --> 00:03:34,455
they concluded that paintings from
Van Gogh's period of psychotic aggetation

60
00:03:34,455 --> 00:03:37,945
behave remarkably similar 
to fluid turbulence.

61
00:03:37,945 --> 00:03:41,998
His self portait with a pipe from
a calmer period in Van Gogh's life

62
00:03:41,998 --> 00:03:44,488
show no sign of this correspondence.

63
00:03:44,488 --> 00:03:49,595
And neither did other artists' work that
seemed equally trubulent at first glance,

64
00:03:49,595 --> 00:03:51,648
like Munch's 'The Scream."

65
00:03:51,648 --> 00:03:54,696
While it's too easy to say Van Gogh's
turbulent genius

66
00:03:54,696 --> 00:03:57,092
enabled him to depict turbulence,

67
00:03:57,092 --> 00:04:02,026
its also far too difficult to accurately
express the rousing beauty of the fact

68
00:04:02,026 --> 00:04:04,477
that in a period of intense suffering,

69
00:04:04,477 --> 00:04:07,931
Van Gogh was somehow able to
perceive and represent

70
00:04:07,931 --> 00:04:10,360
one of the most supremely difficult
concepts

71
00:04:10,360 --> 00:04:13,621
nature has ever brought before mankind,

72
00:04:13,621 --> 00:04:15,760
And to unite his unique mind's eye


73
00:04:15,760 --> 00:04:20,368
with the deepest mysteries
of movement, fluid and light.