THE chaotic swirls of Vincent van Gogh’s later paintings may owe as much to science as they do to art. Physicists believe that some of his works are uncannily accurate pictures of the complex mathematics of turbulence, the phenomenon behind bumpy aircraft rides, cloud formations and the flow of ocean currents.

Van Gogh painted three of his most agitated paintings, A Starry Night, Road with Cypress and Star and Wheat Field with Crows, towards the end of his life when he was suffering prolonged bouts of epilepsy.

José Luis Aragón, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, believes that Van Gogh’s delusions may have given him an insight into how turbulence works.

One of the artist’s doctors noted that the seizures involved “acute mania with hallucinations of sight and hearing”, which Van Gogh described as “the storm within”. Symptoms included visions and unprovoked feelings of anger, confusion and fear.

Señor Aragón, aided by physicists and mathematicians from Mexico, Spain and Oxford, discovered that the patterns of light and dark in Van Gogh’s paintings follow Kolmogorov scaling, the model of turbulent flow described in 1941 by the Russian scientist Andrei Kolmogorov. Using Kolmogorov’s formula, physicists can predict the speed and direction of particles in relation to other particles in a fluid. The model can be observed in smoke leaving a chimney and can even be applied to fluctuations in foreign exchange markets. Señor Aragón took digital images of the paintings and calculated the probability that two pixels a certain distance apart would have the same brightness, or luminance.

“Starry Night and other impassioned Van Gogh pictures were painted during periods of prolonged psychotic agitation and captured the essence of turbulence,” he said.

Van Gogh apparently lost the ability to depict turbulence while he received treatment for psychosis. While in hospital, after mutilating his ear, he was prescribed potassium bromide. During this period, which Van Gogh said was “absolute calm”, his works contained no evidence of Kolmogorov scaling.

Steven Schacter, Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, said that Van Gogh might have been influenced by his epilepsy. “Someone may gain new or novel awareness during seizures,” he said. “I occasionally think of the cortex as an attic, and a partial seizure to shining a flashlight in the attic, revealing feelings or perceptions that are not considered normal, such as out-of-body experiences .”

Van Gogh’s turbulent artwork may also be unique. Señor Aragón found that other pictures with swirling patterns, such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream, do not obey the same mathematical rules.

This is not the first time that Van Gogh’s pictures have been tested. Experiments have shown that bees find his sunflower pictures more attractive than actual flowers.

EPILEPSY SUFFERERS FROM HISTORY

• St Paul’s visions on the road to Damascus — bright flashing, temporary blindness and the inability to eat — are similar to symptoms of epilepsy
  
• The prophet Ezekiel displayed epileptic symptoms such as frequent fainting spells and episodes of dumbness
  
• The author Fyodor Dostoevsky used his experience of epilepsy to create four epileptic characters, including Prince Myshkin in The Idiot
  
• Doctors have speculated that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was inspired by temporal lobe seizures. The sensation of falling down a hole and of objects shrinking and growing are both symptoms
  
• Julius Caesar was afflicted with the “falling sickness” in the last two years of his life

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