Scientists - please stop trying to appear art-friendly by making absurd statements

By Brian Clegg

While some from the arts or educated in the humanities proclaim a profound disinterest in science, most scientists have an interest in the arts. However, sometimes scientists go too far in trying to appear art-friendly or to make arty types feel loved. One of the most egregious examples of this recently has been the attempt to claim that Vincent van Gogh had a deep and intuitive understanding of fluid dynamics.

Last Wednesday’s Times newspaper dedicated more than half a page to this bizarre suggestion. According to article-writer Rhys Blakely, a study of one of van Gogh’s most famous paintings, The Starry Night ‘suggests he also had an uncanny grasp of some of the most elusive laws of physics.’ No he didn’t.

The idea from this study, lead author Dr Yongxiang Huang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is that the swirly bits in van Gogh’s painting are ‘not randomly placed’ but rather ‘follow patterns that appear at just the right distances from one another with the correct size differences and intensities – as predicted by Kolmogorov’s physical laws of turbulence.’ (Incidentally, this idea isn’t new – it featured in a pre-print from 2006.)

I’m sorry, but this is pure fantasy – wishful thinking from those who want to see a connection where none exists. At the very best this is falling into the trap of confusing correlation with causality. There is no reason to suppose that the painter had some uncanny grasp of something not observable by human senses. At the worst it’s playing fast and loose with data that vaguely approximates to theory.

We shouldn’t need this kind of justification to the art world for science. It’s embarrassing. The article mentions Richard Feynman – it would have been more beneficial to have read Feynman’s address on ‘cargo cult science’ because refers to a parallel with what we see here, even though the application is rather different.

Still, it’s a great painting and inspired a rather good piece of music in Don McLean’s Vincent (even if I disagree with McLean that lovers often commit suicide).

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.