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...