#Physics of Fluids

[thepastisalreadywritten]

(CNN) — The dappled starlight and swirling clouds of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” are thought to reflect the artist’s tumultuous state of mind when he painted the work in 1889.

Now, a new analysis by physicists based in China and France suggests the artist had a deep, intuitive understanding of the mathematical structure of turbulent flow.

As a common natural phenomenon observed in fluids — moving water, ocean currents, blood flow, billowing storm clouds and plumes of smoke — turbulent flow is chaotic, as larger swirls or eddies, form and break down into smaller ones.

It may appear random to the casual observer, but turbulence nonetheless follows a cascading pattern that can be studied and, at least partially, explained using mathematical equations.

“Imagine you are standing on a bridge, and you watch the river flow. You will see swirls on the surface, and these swirls are not random.

They arrange themselves in specific patterns, and these kinds of patterns can be predicted by physical laws,” said Yongxiang Huang, lead author of the study that published Tuesday in the scientific journal Physics of Fluids.

Huang is a researcher at State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science & College of Ocean and Earth Sciences at Xiamen University in southeastern China.

“The Starry Night” is an oil-on-canvas painting that, the study noted, depicts a view just before sunrise from the east-facing window of the artist’s asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France.

Van Gogh had admitted himself to an asylum there after mutilating his left ear.

Using a digital image of the painting, Huang and his colleagues examined the scale of its 14 main whirling shapes to understand whether they aligned with physical theories that describe the transfer of energy from large- to small-scale eddies as they collide and interact with one another.

‘The Starry Night’ and turbulence theories

The atmospheric motion of the painted sky cannot be directly measured, so Huang and his colleagues precisely measured the brushstrokes and compared the size of the brushstrokes to the mathematical scales expected from turbulence theories.

To gauge physical movement, they used the relative brightness or luminance of the varying paint colors.

They discovered that the sizes of the 14 whirls or eddies in “The Starry Night,” and their relative distance and intensity, follow a physical law that governs fluid dynamics known as Kolmogorov’s Theory of Turbulence.

In the 1940s, Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov (1903–1987) described a mathematical relationship between the fluctuations in a flow’s speed and the rate at which its energy dissipates.

Huang and the team also found that the paint, at the smallest scale, mixes around with some background swirls and whirls in a fashion predicted by turbulence theory, following a statistical pattern known as Batchelor’s scaling.

Batchelor’s scaling mathematically represents how small particles, such as drifting algae in the ocean or pieces of dust in the wind, are passively mixed around by turbulent flow.

“This is cool. Indeed this is the type of statistics you would expect from algae blooms being swept around by ocean currents, or dust and particulates in the air,” said James Beattie, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University in New Jersey, in an email.

Beattie wasn’t involved in this study but has conducted similar research on the artwork.

“In my paper, I only ever really looked at the large (swirls in the painting), so I didn’t see this second relation,” he said, referring to the Batchelor’s scaling.

‘An amazing coincidence’

Of course, Huang said, van Gogh would not have been aware of such equations but likely he spent a lot of time observing turbulence in nature.

“I think this physical relationship must be embedded in his mind so that’s why when he made this famous ‘Starry Night’ painting, it mimics the real flow,” Huang said.

Beattie agreed: “It’s an amazing coincidence that Van Gogh’s beautiful painting shares many of the same statistics as turbulence,” he said.

“This makes some sense — the models have been constructed to try to capture the statistics of eddies and swirls on multiple scales, each swirl communicating with other swirls through the turbulent cascade.

In some sense, Van Gogh painted something that represents this phenomenon, so why shouldn’t there be some convergence between the theoretical models and the statistics of Van Gogh’s swirls?”

The study team performed the same analysis and detected the same phenomenon in two other images:

— a painting, “Chain Pier, Brighton,” created by British artist John Constable in 1826-7;

— a photograph of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, taken by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft on 5 March 1979.

“Unlike ‘The Starry Night,’ this painting lacks well-defined swirling patterns, but the clouds are rich of structures with different scales, resembling those frequently seen in the sky,” the study noted of Constable’s artwork.

On display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “The Starry Night” is an enormously popular work of art that has been recreated in Lego bricks, drones and dominoes.

Huang said that scientists had long struggled to describe turbulent flow in fluid dynamics in a way that would allow them to predict the phenomenon and that a complete explanation remains a prevailing mystery of physics.

A thorough understanding would help with weather forecasting, flight turbulence and many other processes, he said.

“Even after more than 100 years (of) study, we even don’t know how to define this complex phenomenon,” Huang said.

“It’s extremely important, but it’s extremely difficult.”

"The fact that “The Starry Night” matched statistical models of turbulence even though the artwork doesn’t actually move could suggest that the statistical methods and tools are less precise than scientists may have thought," Beattie said.

"The painting can’t be precisely measured because it’s “actually not turbulence. … (I)t has no kinetic energy,” he said.

However, Beattie said that he was a huge fan of the work of art and that it reflected universality and the beauty of turbulence.

“I deeply love the fact that I can take my understanding of the turbulence in the plasma between galaxies and apply it to the turbulence between stars, between Earth and the Sun or in our own lakes, oceans and atmosphere,” he said.

“What I take away from studies like this is that (van Gogh) captured some of this universality in the beautiful (‘Starry Night’),” Beattie added.

“And I think people know this. They know that something wonderful has been embedded in this painting and we are drawn to it.”

[familythings]

Scientists Uncover the Secret Behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night"!* 🌌🎨

Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic painting “Starry Night,” created in 1889, is not just a masterpiece; it is also a fascinating insight into the cosmos. Scientists have discovered that the artwork aligns remarkably well with the astronomical principles of our sky. This suggests that Van Gogh was far ahead of 19th-century scientific thought. Push up Leggings for self-confident women that are able to…

[bacchuschucklefuck]

no more fan-ta-sizing about it! everything's already changed~

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

"Dew Point" Deposits Droplets

Artist Lily Clark loves to work in water. One of her recent sculptures, "Dew Point," uses superhydrophobic ceramic to grow and manipulate water droplets over and over and over.  (Video credit: L. Turczan; artwork by: L. Clark; via Colossal) Read the full article

[aliosne]

Saw a post about working class butches in physical labour jobs and wanted to make my own, so: I love you butches who do childcare or early education. I love you butch nurses. I love you butch house cleaners and janitorial staff. I love you service industry butches. I love you butches who do sex work. I love you working class butches who do “feminine” jobs you are cool as hell

[theshiftershop]

After getting to know each other and developing trust, Shop finally reveals herself to Terri as a shapeshifter, much to the witch's delight!

Turns out, the types of potions Terri was trying to pursue needed materials only shapeshifters could supply, which was partly why Shop guarded her secret with great care-

But hey! Now she's got two lovelies that she can be herself around, in anyway or shape she chooses!

[mouthtapedguy]

Cows have better highway MPG

[noosphe-re]

Toroidal flow pattern in the Taylor vortex flow regime. a , velocity field; b , pressure contours (low pressure on the inner wall, r = 8 ). (Climent, Eric & Simonnet, Marie & Magnaudet, Jacques. (2007). Preferential accumulation of bubbles in Couette-Taylor flow patterns. Physics of Fluids. 19. 10.1063/1.2752839.)

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

I find Xiao Yao really fascinating as a gender-fluid character in Lost You Forever.

When the show starts, she's been living as a man for 200-ish years and we're later told she learned how to control her appearance, though she doesn't know what her original self looks like. Living as a man is probably more about safety than anything else, but she acts like a man and seems comfortable in her gender, if a little exaggerated in her mannerisms. She also has surrounded herself with men, adopting two boys and a former solider and doesn't seem to have any strong relationships with women.

When she recovers her true appearance, she's only really concerned about Jing finding her attractive and when he's visiting is the only time she's shown to be concerned about clothes or jewellery, which is cute because he semi-proposed to her when she was still a man and with zero idea of what she looked like. She tells a group of women at a banquet that she just wears what she's given by her father. She never displays much of a interest in feminine pursuits, only sewing once to make a present, and it's not like she lacks time to learn, she just doesn't care. She doesn't form any strong relationships with women (except her sister), mostly preferring to hang out with men (cousin, grandpa, and Snake Boy) She also frequently switches back to dressing in masculine clothes. It's not totally clear she needs to appear as a man to do medicine, since she passes her original practice to a woman, but she always defaults to male (I think this also might be to protect her reputation as princess or to disguise her identity).

Xiao Yao seems fairly comfortable in both genders, but I feel like she mostly assumed the identity of both female and a princess to help Cang Xuan, her preference is probably to appear male. (she is also attracted to men and as far as I can tell, JIng is straight but doesn't care if she looks like a man).

Anyway, all of this is to say that I headcanon when Xiao Yao and Tushan Jing are in hiding after the end of the show, that XY would revert to a male identity and either the neighbours would gossip about how those two guys seem really close or TSJ would appear female. He's got to use an illusion anyway, he's too handsome, they'd find him.

[f-imaginings]

I have a genuine question being Aroace but I'm afraid to ask and my headcanon will go to waste.

But KMKY's Ford always seemed to be at least in some way the aroace look (being demi or gray that is), did you do it out of want, in the idea of looking, or is it just part of the character and you never thought of yourself in a sexuality for him?

I can definitely see Ford being ace!

I myself am demisexual so I definitely think some of that perspective leeched into how I write Ford. Because my own experience informed how I wrote him, little things like being kind of oblivious/frustrated when strangers flirt with him (the hand witch or the girl from college who worked in the aquarium with the legwarmers lmao) because they don't know him!!! So how dare they!!! Lmao, falling for Bill's mind first since it didn't really matter that he was a shape or a muse or whatever, the rest would work itself out, feeling seen and only crushing initially because it seemed like his mind was being appreciated first and foremost, and treating their sex life like an experiment/engaging with the kinks/power plays inherent rather than just going through the motions (because kink makes more sense sometimes than just some undefined biological urge that you're supposed to have but no one can explain it to you, yet it's perfectly understandable to go 'oh they like feeling powerless as a powerful being I understand that perfectly, now how can I get creative with it'.)

I definitely think he wanted romantic attention from Bill, and wanted to be valued romantically (hence going on a date with Susan and Cathy Crenshaw) but the idea of getting romantic attention from a stranger is unappealing (hence why he was so reluctant to go on the date with Susan) and wanted the sort of holistic acceptance that comes with ideas of romance (because then his polydactylism will be accepted along with his unique mind) but the traditional trappings of romantic relationships aren't that appealing (was worried that he would have to engage in gay culture/grow a moustache and have a makeover to be in this relationship ECT). Bill was great for him BC he accepted and actively sought out all of Ford's weirdness and the dark bits you're ashamed to show, and then got freaky with them lmao. And there's no way to cement a bond quicker than to show someone your most vulnerable parts and have them accept those things unconditionally. Turning shame into dependence right there. That truly is the no one knows you like I do trap, and that shit feels inescapable.

Because of my own experience I know that you can be demisexual and still have a preference for gender or looks, hence why he built the "flattering vessel" for Bill to not only be flattering by beauty standards in general but also subconsciously to be exactly what Ford found attractive. The kicker is that personality means more than good looks, so when Bill inhabited the body in a different way than Stanford expected but he still found his personality all the more fascinating because of it, that was probably what cinched his feelings BC he got to know more about Bill's weirdness and see how it matched his own.

I am giving you a big virtual hug anon BC no head canon is ever wasted, how you engage with a story you like is important and you deserve to feel seen and heard when you engage in content you like. If I can go some way towards making the fandom of this fic a safe welcoming place it's my privilege to do so as a writer!

[highlyentropicmind]

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Charged Drops Don't Splash

When a droplet falls on a surface, it spreads itself horizontally into a thin lamella. Sometimes -- depending on factors like viscosity, impact speed, and air pressure -- that drop splashes, breaking up along its edge into myriad smaller droplets. But a new study finds that a small electrical charge is enough to suppress a drop's splash. (Image and research credit: F. Yu et al.; via APS News) Read the full article

[scarypikachu]

What if dark matter isn’t really matter at all?

Maybe it’s some kind of energy we haven’t discovered yet — not made of particles, not something physical, but more like a force or pressure that helps hold things together in space. Not saying it’s a fluid, but maybe the way fluid dynamics work could help us understand how this energy behaves. Like how planets and stars drift smoothly without crashing into each other — what if there’s an energy “medium” that makes that possible?

Not claiming to be a scientist, just thinking out loud... 👀

[royalycreativepidgeon]

A couple of the new listing that went up today

https://www.tedooo.com/shop/649c622f7e7f5f470ced4a4a

[alistairlowee]

hiiiijhihihijihihi this is so random but u reblogged a post about someone named donatella screwing over someone named scarlett and my first thought was

"vERSACE!?"

needed to put this out somewhere

also hiiii amberrrr how r uu

Hiiii Andi. I was considering sending you an ask yesterday lol but idk why I got busy or something and didn't

Lmaooo, Donatella and Scarlett are from the Caraval series by Stephanie Garber. I adoreee it like it's excellent