STARLIGHT
Painting “STARLIGHT” of Van Gogh
"This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big," Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother.
Kolmogorovs theory from the 1940's — to which Aragón et. al. compared van Gogh's work — is incredibly close to how turbulence actually works. But a complete description of it still remains an unsolved problem in physics.
And yet, van Gogh represented "turbulence" in paintings ... while sitting in an asylum.
As an fun postscript, van Gogh's art isn't the only time that this analogy with hydrodynamic turbulence was reported in an ostensibly unrelated field of study. As Aragรณn noted in his paper, it has also been " observed in fluctuations of the foreign exchange marke ts time series ."