Pictures of the great artist help scientists to study natural phenomena
GENETICS: A GENIUS IMMORTALIZED THE SUNFLOWER MUTATION
The Dutch impressionist Vincent van Gogh is like a cosmos that everyone can study: from artists and art critics to doctors and astronomers. The other day they became interested in ... genetics.
In Van Gogh's famous Sunflowers series, strange flowers can be seen. Usually, a sunflower flower has a dark circle in the center framed by large golden petals. In the artist, we see that the central disk of flowers is hidden under the disheveled dark orange growth. Until now, it was believed that this is a fantasy of a genius. It turned out - no. Van Gogh meticulously immortalized a mutation that sometimes affects sunflowers. This conclusion was made by scientists from the University of Georgia.
What kind of mutation causes such a strange "disarranged" form? The researchers speculated that perhaps the cause of flower changes is mutations in the CYC genes.
The family of these genes affects not only the structure of flowers in other aster genera related to sunflower, one of the authors of the study explained Mark Chapman. - With this gene, "Vangogh flowers" with an almost absent central disc are practically unable to reproduce. Insects have nothing to pollinate. But how the genes of such mutants work, we did not know. Therefore, we decided to conduct an experiment.
In order to get a sunflower, "like Van Gogh's", geneticists crossed an ordinary sunflower with a semi-mutant one, that is, with one in which the central disk was not very "shaggy". Such plants could still produce offspring. As a result, scientists got the famous sunflowers.
They appeared due to mutations in the HaCYC2c gene, Chapman argued. - It penetrates into all tissues of the plant and turns it into "shaggy" and barren.
The discovered mutation, which the genius immortalized, is not widely distributed. It appears randomly and is quickly washed out of the population.
oceanology
One day, while admiring Van Gogh's Starry Night, NASA specialists suddenly discovered that they had seen something similar somewhere - in their laboratories, on their computers. They checked it and it turned out - for sure: there is a similarity between this canvas and ... NASA's model of ocean currents.
Recall that the picture depicts huge stars surrounded by spherical halos of flickering light. Some are pale gold, others are white-hot - they create a sense of rotation. As if yellow-white whirlpools are spinning. (By the way, Greek electrical engineer and artist Petros Vrellis decided to use this effect. He created an interactive reproduction of this painting. To create it, he used the touch screen and openFrameworks tools. With the touch of a finger, you can change the animated canvas to your liking, and then return everything to its original form.) All this spiraling, curving and twisting "orgy" resembles ocean currents when viewed from space.
The NASA model was built thanks to a science project studying the role of the ocean in future climate change scenarios. It is called Ocean Climate Assessment Phase II (ECCO2). "Our specialists have made a high-resolution model of the world's oceans," a NASA representative explained in a press release. “And they found eddies and currents in the ocean that carry heat and carbon dioxide around the world.” The interactive ECCO2 model simulates ocean currents at all depths, but only surface currents are used in a specially created visualization - to compare with Wang Gog currents.
In addition, it turned out that the same "Vangogh whirlpools" also form huge greenish accumulations of phytoplankton in the dark waters around the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants that form the most important link in the food chain in the ocean. When it blooms, undercurrents bring nutrients to the sun-lit surface of the ocean. And as a result, these microscopic plants grow and multiply.
According to some experts, Mother Nature’s paintings of “swirls” turned out to be much more intricate than those of an impressionist artist. But this is understandable. Not only does nature have a giant planet as a “canvas”, and not a canvas measuring 73.7 by 92.1 cm. And the creator of the masterpiece himself was not in the best shape. Van Gogh painted "Starry Night" in June 1889 during a stay in the psychiatric hospital of St. Paul of Mausoleum near Saint-Remy. He experienced severe bouts of depression. And only in rare moments of relative calm did he devote himself entirely to painting. And it was to the "Starry Night" that Van Gogh returned to correct something, on the night when he committed suicide.
ASTRONOMY: IMPRESSIONIST EXACTLY CAPTURES THE BIG MOON PHENOMENON
And not so long ago, an American astronomer from the University of Texas, Donald Olson, became interested in Van Gogh. He drew attention to a painting called "Moon Rising". On it, the crimson Moon peeks out from behind the top of the mountain and illuminates everything with an ominous red-orange light. Maybe it's the sunrise and the artist just got it mixed up? - art critics asked. She is very big and bright. But they did not have the opportunity to check: the exact date of the painting was unknown.
After conducting his own investigation, Olson found out that the painting was painted on July 12, 1889. On this day, Vincent was in the same mental hospital in San Remy. And he painted a picture, looking out of the window of his chamber.
It was the so-called “lunar illusion,” the astronomer convinced. - That is, an optical illusion in which the perceived size of the Moon is about one and a half times larger when it is low above the horizon, compared to how it is perceived when it is high in the sky, although its projections on the retina in both cases are equal .
The astronomer explained the appearance of strange shadows under the mountain. It turned out that Van Gogh painted this picture in two steps - he started in the evening and finished in the morning. Therefore, the moon was depicted rising in the evening. And the shadows under the mountain appeared because they were cast by the rising Sun in the morning.
All experts are convinced of one thing: despite the fact that Van Gogh often allowed himself all sorts of impressionistic things like unnaturally bright colors and distortion of perspective, he never distorted reality. So, for example, astronomers studied several paintings of the artist's night sky and made sure that each of them was written with astronomical accuracy. One of them - "The White House at Night" - depicts a huge star above the house. It turned out that it was Venus. On the day the masterpiece was written - June 16, 1890 - it shone especially brightly.
QUOTE
“Whenever I see the stars, I begin to dream - just as involuntarily as I dream, looking at the black dots that mark cities on a geographical map. Why, I ask myself, should the bright dots in the sky be less accessible to us than the black dots on the map of France?
Just as we are driven by a train when we go to Rouen or Tarascon, death takes us to the stars. However, in this reasoning, only one thing is indisputable: while we live, we cannot go to a star, just as, having died, we cannot board a train. It is probable that cholera, syphilis, consumption, cancer are nothing but celestial means of transportation, playing the same role as steamboats, omnibuses, and trains on earth. And natural death from old age is tantamount to a pedestrian mode of transportation..
Fatal duality haunted the artist throughout his short life. It really seemed like two people got along in it. He dreamed of a family hearth and children, calling it "real life." However, he devoted himself entirely to art. He wanted to become a priest, like his father, and he himself, breaking all the rules, began to live with "one of those women whom priests curse from the pulpit." With him, especially in recent years, there were strong attacks of insanity, the rest of the time he reasoned very soberly. Van Gogh deified Paul Gauguin, whom he invited to live in his studio. And he also made an attempt on Gauguin, during the next attack.
Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, exactly one year after his older brother, who lived only 6 weeks. Replacing the parents of the deceased first-born, Vincent inherited his name. Vincent had mental problems since childhood: he was gloomy and taciturn, quarrelsome and quick-tempered. So much so that the father had to take his son out of school, and only at the age of 13 he was sent to a boarding school for 3 years.
Van Gogh made his final decision to become an artist at the age of 27. Three years of titanic labor were spent on comprehending the secrets of mastery. A short 7 years fell on the period of his own creativity, interrupted in the last 1.5 years by bouts of illness. And at 37, the artist committed suicide. By the way, there is still no definite answer to the question of what he was ill with.
During his lifetime, it was mainly about epilepsy. In the twentieth century, the opinions of scientists were divided. Modern psychiatrists have found signs of schizophrenia in the artist, which was not yet known during the life of Van Gogh. This disease was first described only in 1911. There were also those who believed that the artist's mental illness was a consequence of neurosyphilis or meningoencephalitis. Others continue to claim that Van Gogh suffered from epilepsy.
Vinsetn's whole life was filled with mysteries, but the biggest mysteries were discovered by scientists already in the 20th century. Having created and studied a mathematical model of Van Gogh's paintings, physicist Jose Luis Aragon, from the Mexican National Autonomous University, discovered turbulent (eddy) flows invisible to the eye that occur in nature with the rapid flow of liquid or gas.
Mathematical turbulence was first described by the great mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov in the 1940s. At present, it has not yet been fully explored. It is all the more incomprehensible how Vincent, not possessing special knowledge, could capture it so accurately.
Many of Vincent van Gogh's paintings (for example, "Starry Night") contain the characteristic "statistical fingerprints" of turbulence. According to scientists, the "turbulent" works were created by the artist precisely at those moments when Van Gogh suffered from hallucinations and depression. Jose Luis Aragon believes that: "Van Gogh had a unique ability to see and capture turbulence, and this happened to him precisely during periods of mental disorder."
But there are pictures where the "traces of turbulence" are invisible at first glance. Among them is the famous "Self-portrait with a pipe and a bandaged ear", which Van Gogh painted, injuring himself. He was then under the influence of sedatives (bromine) and, in his own words, was in a state of "unearthly rest".
José Luis Aragon notes that Van Gogh is the only artist who could paint turbulence: "We studied other 'chaotic' paintings by Impressionist artists and did not find any correspondence to Kolmogorov's theory. For example, in Edvard Munch's painting The Scream, which looks very similar to Van Gogh's vortices, the distribution of brightness does not correspond to the theory of turbulence."
According to Vincent van Gogh, when he had to leave the house at night to paint the sky and stars, he felt an acute need for religiosity: "I very much need, dare I say it? Religion." Perhaps his early spiritual experience had an effect here, he was preparing to take the priesthood, and heredity - both his father and grandfather were shepherds. And at such moments he fell into a kind of religious ecstasy, and the cosmic consciousness was revealed to him, being in which he painted his fantastic pictures.
Another mystery was recently solved by the American astronomer Donald Olson. Van Gogh has a painting known as Moonrise. But many researchers of his work believe that it would be more correct to call it "Sunset". The crimson monster, peeking out from behind the top of the mountain, can actually be both. The situation is complicated by the fact that no one knew the exact date of the painting. Until Olson named her - July 12, 1889.
According to Olson, Van Gogh, who often allows himself an outrageous riot of colors, perspective distortions, and unsteadiness of forms, never allowed himself to distort reality - he just saw it that way. Van Gogh's paintings of the night sky are stunning in their astronomical accuracy.
He proved this a couple of years ago and determined to within an hour the time of writing another painting by Van Gogh "The White House at Night". He found this house and identified the fierce star that hung on the Van Gogh painting as Venus, and from here he found the day and hour of the creation of the masterpiece. According to astronomical calculations, Venus really shone especially brightly that day.
Convinced that in the case of the painting "Moonrise" the great Vincent did not deviate from nature, Olson went to France last summer. He only knew that in September 1889, Van Gogh sent his brother Theo a parcel with two paintings - Moonrise and the much more famous Starry Night. He also knew that in May of the same year, Van Gogh went to heal his psyche in a monastery shelter in San Remy. There Olson found out that Van Gogh painted the picture, looking out the window of his chamber, that it was definitely the Moon, and it was a matter of technique for the astronomer to determine the time of painting with an error of plus or minus one minute.
There remains, however, one more mystery associated with this picture - a shadow under the mountain. The moon could not leave her, and the sun did not rise quite there. According to Olson, this inconsistency has a very simple explanation. Simply Van Gogh painted the picture in two steps - he started in the evening and finished in the morning. So what we actually see on the canvas is the moon rising in the evening - with the shadows cast by the rising sun in the morning.
Surprisingly, it was these almost dying pictures, sent to his brother in one parcel, that became the object of the closest attention of scientists. Some time ago, it was "Starry Night" with its swirling stars that led doctors to unravel another secret of the artist - his passion for blinding yellow. Van Gogh, as you know, had much more illness than money, but many attributed the yellow tones of his paintings to the action of absinthe. Then the medicine santonin was added to this popular liquor, from which children sometimes began to see everything in yellow. However, recent studies have shown that for an adult, the world will turn yellow only after he drinks about 200 quarts (228 liters) of absinthe at a time.
According to scientists, Van Gogh's yellow palette owes its existence to his epilepsy. Since 1890, he was treated for it according to the prescriptions of Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet and drank digitalis in accordance with them. This medicine was then very popular as a remedy for epilepsy. But chronic poisoning with digitalis can in some cases make the world yellow for the patient, and, in particular, he will see yellow circles around the stars - exactly the same as we see in Van Gogh's famous painting "Starry Night".
Until now, astronomers are haunted by the way, for example, in the painting "Road with Cypresses and Stars" Vincent depicted a thin crescent moon. It was like this on April 20, 1890, at about 7 pm, and on the left side of the picture there are two more star-shaped objects. This is how the planets Venus and Mercury were located at that time. More precisely, not exactly: Van Gogh for some reason painted these planets mirrored, but did not "flip" the Moon itself. It turns out that Van Gogh's case with an inverted sky is not the only one.
His famous painting "Starry Night" depicts a mysterious star spiral in the center. It is very similar to the 19th-century sketch of the Whirlpool galaxy in Hounds of the Dog. This sketch was repeatedly published, and Van Gogh could see it in Camille Flammarion's book Stars. But it is also captured in a mirror image. And in the painting "Starry Night on the Rhine" the bucket of the Big Dipper is also turned in the other direction ... It is unlikely that we will be able to find out what all this meant for Van Gogh.
British biologists have recently become interested in the unusual properties of Van Gogh's paintings. They found that Van Gogh's Sunflowers attracted lab bees more than other paintings, including Paul Gauguin's Vase of Flowers.
Behavioral ecologists at the University of London College have studied the behavior of bees that have never seen real flowers. They were shown four paintings: "Sunflowers" by Van Gogh and "Vase" by Gauguin, as well as "Still Life with a Beer Mug" by the French cubist Fernand Léger and "Pots" by Patrick Cofield, an English pop art artist. Biologists recorded how many times the bees flew up to each picture, and how many times they landed on them. It turned out that the artists of the 20th century were less interested in bees than the post-impressionists of the 19th century. Insects landed on Léger's and Caufield's paintings only four times each. Bees went to Van Gogh 146 times and landed 15. According to one of the scientists, Professor Lars Chitka, bees have an innate attraction to flowers, and Van Gogh managed to capture their very essence.
Another sensational discovery associated with the name of Van Gogh was recently made by French scientists. When examining the paintings, the restorers of the Paris museum found another one under the main layer of paint, partially worn off due to old age. With the help of high-precision equipment, experts removed the top layer and were horrified. A typical nuclear "mushroom" was depicted in every detail on the canvas. The fact that Vincent wrote it does not raise doubts among experts, this is also evidenced by the signature in the corner ... Moreover, the area depicted on the canvas surrounding the epicenter of a thermonuclear explosion bore a clear imprint of radiation exposure. It was a poisonous, lifeless desert, more like an alien landscape or our earth, or rather what it could become if people did not stop nuclear experiments.
How could Van Gogh, who died long before the first atomic tests, learn about the mechanism and consequences of a radioactive explosion? This will remain another of his riddles, which is impossible to solve, and perhaps not necessary. After all, we have the most important thing - paintings that capture the cosmic revelations of Van Gogh.
1. Van Gogh's air currents
Mathematicians who studied Van Gogh's paintings came to the conclusion that the swirls on some of his canvases quite accurately describe turbulent air flows invisible to the eye. This is expressed in the fact that the greater or lesser brightness of the points in the patterns is proportional to the velocities of the flow points in the corresponding coordinates in the mathematical modeling of turbulence. Scientists also note that similar paintings, including the famous Starry Night, were painted by Van Gogh during periods of mental instability.
2. Da Vinci Melody
In "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci, the melody is encrypted. It was discovered by computer technician Giovanni Maria Pala: if you draw a musical staff along the picture, then slices of bread on the table and the hands of the apostles can be read as notes. Even skeptics admitted that the harmony of this melody is impeccable and it could not accidentally appear in the picture.
3. Nude Mona Lisa
The famous "Gioconda" exists in two versions: the nude version is called "Monna Vanna", it was painted by the little-known artist Salai, who was a student and sitter of the great Leonardo da Vinci. Many art critics are sure that it was he who was the model for Leonardo's paintings "John the Baptist" and "Bacchus". There are also versions that dressed in a woman's dress, Salai served as the image of the Mona Lisa herself.
4. The secret of the old fisherman
In 1902, the Hungarian artist Tivadar Kostka Chontvari painted the painting "Old Fisherman". It would seem that there is nothing unusual in the picture, but Tivadar laid a subtext in it, which was never revealed during the life of the artist. 
Few people thought of putting a mirror in the middle of the picture. In each person there can be both God (the right shoulder of the Old Man is duplicated) and the Devil (the left shoulder of the old man is duplicated). 
5. Revenge of Salvador Dali
The painting "Figure at the Window" was painted in 1925, when Dali was 21 years old. Then Gala had not yet entered the life of the artist, and his sister Ana Maria was his muse. The relationship between brother and sister deteriorated when he wrote in one of the paintings "sometimes I spit on a portrait of my own mother, and it gives me pleasure." Ana Maria could not forgive such shocking.
In her 1949 book Salvador Dali Through the Eyes of a Sister, she writes about her brother without any praise. The book infuriated El Salvador. For another ten years after that, he angrily remembered her at every opportunity. And so, in 1954, the painting "A young virgin indulging in Sodomy with the help of the horns of her own chastity" appears. The pose of the woman, her curls, the landscape outside the window and the color scheme of the painting clearly echo the Figure at the Window. There is a version that this is how Dali took revenge on his sister for her book.
Like many geniuses, the great Van Gogh was, to put it mildly, strange. It is a known fact that in a moment of spiritual crisis he cut off his ear. However, this was no ordinary delusion.
“A study of the mathematical model of the paintings of the great Dutch artist showed that some of his paintings depict turbulent vortex flows invisible to the eye that occur when a liquid or gas flows quickly, for example, when gas flows out of a jet engine nozzle,” Viktor Kozlov, professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute, told us. - A peculiar, as if chaotically looped manner of writing by the artist, as it turned out, is nothing more than a distribution of brightness corresponding to the mathematical description of a turbulent flow.
The foundations of the modern theory of turbulence were laid by the great mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov in the 1940s of the 20th century. However, there is no exact description of it to this day. Now the situation may change.
According to the researchers, many of Vincent van Gogh's paintings (such as "Starry Night", painted in 1889) contain the characteristic "statistical fingerprints" of turbulence. As scientists note, "turbulent" works were created by the artist in those moments when his psyche was unstable. At this time, the painter was visited by hallucinations, tormented by depression. Visions that haunted Van Gogh poured out on his canvases into uneven, as if nervously twisted spirals. He repeatedly admitted to his friends that, having made another sketch, he calmed down for a while, as if he had completed some important mission.
“Apparently, Van Gogh had a unique ability to see and capture turbulence, and this happened to him precisely during periods of mental disorder,” argues Professor Kozlov. - At the same time, the artist has paintings where "traces of turbulence" are invisible. Among them is the famous "Self-portrait with a pipe and a bandaged ear" (1888). Van Gogh, having injured himself, was under the influence of sedatives, in particular bromine, and, in his own words, was in a state of "complete rest."
- Van Gogh's gift is unique, - says our interlocutor. - Researchers have digitized his works and calculated them mathematically. Apparently, he is the only artist who could draw turbulence. The paintings of other painters, even those similar in style of painting, do not contain the correspondence of Kolmogorov's theory. For this reason, it is the work of Van Gogh that can become a turning point for modern science. With its help, scientists are going to develop the theory of turbulence and finally explain this phenomenon. Its solution will help, for example, to solve this problem in aviation: after all, today the cause of many air accidents is precisely turbulence.
Who knows, maybe Van Gogh's "mission", "destiny", which he told his friends about, was, among other things, the salvation of distant descendants? In this case, are doctors always right when they provide their patients with "complete rest"?
Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" is considered by many to be the pinnacle of expressionism. It is curious that the artist himself considered it an extremely unsuccessful work, and it was written at the time of the master's mental discord. What is so unusual in this canvas - let's try to figure it out further in the review.
1. “Starry night” Van Gogh wrote in a mental hospital
The moment of creating the picture was preceded by a difficult emotional period in the life of the artist. A few months earlier, Van Gogh's friend Paul Gauguin had come to Arles to exchange paintings and experiences. But a fruitful creative tandem did not work out, and after a couple of months the artists finally quarreled. In the heat of emotional distress, Van Gogh cut off his earlobe and took it to a brothel to the prostitute Rachel, who favored Gauguin. So they did with a bull defeated in a bullfight. The matador got the severed ear of the animal.
Gauguin left soon after, and Van Gogh's brother Theo, seeing his condition, sent the unfortunate man to the hospital for the mentally ill in Saint-Remy. It was there that the expressionist created his famous painting.
2. "Starry night" is not a real landscape
Researchers are trying in vain to figure out which constellation is depicted in Van Gogh's painting. The artist took the plot from his imagination. Theo agreed at the clinic that a separate room was allocated for his brother, where he could create, but the mentally ill was not allowed out into the street.
3. Turbulence is depicted in the sky
Either the heightened perception of the world, or the sixth sense that opened it, forced the artist to depict turbulence. At that time, eddy currents could not be seen with the naked eye.
Although 4 centuries before Van Gogh, another brilliant artist Leonardo da Vinci depicted a similar phenomenon.
4. The artist considered his painting extremely unsuccessful
Vincent van Gogh believed that his "Starry Night" was not the best canvas, because it was not painted from life, which was very important to him. When the painting came to the exhibition, the artist rather disparagingly said about it: "Maybe she'll show others how to do better night effects than I did.". However, for the expressionists, who believed that the most important thing is the manifestation of feelings, "Starry Night" has become almost an icon.
5 Van Gogh Created Another Starry Night
There was another "Starry Night" in the Van Gogh collection. The stunning landscape cannot leave anyone indifferent. The artist himself, after creating this picture, wrote to his brother Theo: Why can't the bright stars in the sky be more important than the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, so we die to get to the stars.”.
Today, the works of this artist cost fabulous money, but
