Van Gogh and Science

 

Geo Magazine offers us a very nasty article that will delight aesthetes in my genre. Everything is false, very naive. Researchers are resolutely off-target. When you think that science is leading the world and these researchers are the cutting edge, it’s a shock. Or a scare.

 

The Article:

Did Vincent van Gogh know that he represented a scientific phenomenon in colour when he painted The Starry Night? When he created this work, which became extremely famous in 1889, the painter was in a complicated psychological state. This blue sky that gives the impression of whirling would therefore represent his cloudy and lost mind. But, more than a century later, physicists explain that much more down-to-earth things are happening in this painting.

In the journal Physics of Fluids, on September 17, a team of French and Chinese scientists explained that La Nuit étoilée showed that Vincent van Gogh had a very fine understanding of the phenomenon of turbulence. (…)

 

Missing the point

Yongxiang Huang and his colleagues were intrigued by the swirls visible on the painting of the Dutch painter – painted from his room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had been interned after cutting his ear. They then sought to know whether these responded to the laws of physics. (…)

For the researchers, the result is clear: the 14 swirls of van Gogh perfectly respond to the fluid theory developed by the Soviet mathematician Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov in 1940 – 50 years after the realization of The Starry Night, therefore. (…)

 

 

For Yongxiang Huang and the other researchers, this does not mean that Vincent van Gogh was a mathematician who pioneered the theory of turbulence. They see it as an “incredible coincidence” due to the painter’s increased observation of nature. (the rest here)

 

Off the mark

The explanation may be scientific, but it explains nothing important. To speak of “incredible coincidence” shows the degree of thickness of the scientific community in the face of subtle phenomena — which they ignore even exist. While they grope in absolute darkness, the first visionary, sighted, sensitive or retarded will tell you by looking at this painting: “Here? This painter sees the same things I do.”

To speak of coincidence when one claims to be a scientist says a lot about short ideas.

 

And Einstein thought the same thing. (source)Albert Einstein, What I believe

While your goofy white coats calculate the trajectory of energy, the visionaries see it. The blind use reason, the visionary use intuition. Body knowledge.

 

Minions

The first are the worthy servants of our masters the Reptilians, the second greet the masters who will come. If, however, humanity succeeds in formulating a new mode of thought: the non-thinking. The non-mental. The feeling. The vision.

 

While some idiots speculate as finely as the AI (famous donkey’s cry) that animates them, the insane asylums are filled with suicidal virtuosos, prophets broken by a systematic system, precisely.

 

We can’t stop the world from going round. Who’s to blame if it’s going square?

I just saw an amazing film. Wow! First year tells the journey of two students in 1st year medicine. One of them, the most human, gives a prophetic conclusion: “I would say that 3 hours to answer 72 questions with 5 answers to choose from, it is about two minutes per question. At this rate, it is impossible to choose. Either we respond by reptilian reflex or completely by chance.

I think the best, those who will become doctors are closer to the reptile than the human being.” (source)Thomas Lilti, Première année / First Year (2018)

 

Couldn’t say better

The univocal and logical archaic medicine that dominates us is even more inept than that of the time of Molière. This medicine that he has so well whipped in his imaginary Patient or his Doctor against him. I would like to have a tenth of his talent to scoop Pharmafric, great goddess of the reptilian doctors, first wife of Mammon the archon.

How far does one look deep in the abyss of human stupidity? In the unfathomable abyss of selfishness?  Such a decline, the rise of barbarism; the closing of the heart and that, even stronger, of the purse; the absence of horizon, the lack of ideal, the withdrawal of generous impulses; the narrowness of mind reduced still by a stupid conservatism. We keep what has hurt us, we accentuate what will harm us, we refuse what could help us.

The Macron label really has really something to discourage… But there is surely worse. Or else it will come.

 

 

Don’t worry. Be happy.

 

Anything we don’t understand, we better get rid of.
The Smithsonian Institution