exhaled-spirals:

« — Van Gogh was an avid reader of Camille Flammarion [French astronomer]’s work. Which explains why, in his Starry Night painting, he reproduced the position of the stars with perfect precision, which has allowed us to date the painting almost down to the minute.

Physics has been a major influence for art. Has the opposite ever happened?

— It is much rarer, but there are some examples. Edgar Allan Poe, in his poem Eureka, solved the paradox of the darkness of night—why night is dark despite the billions of stars in the universe. But we didn’t notice until sixty years later. M.C. Escher, known for his lithographs playing with object repetition and perspective, has inspired an entire branch of mathematics […]. But beyond that I think reading poetry, and practising art in general, fertilises the mind in a subconscious way. It can enrich a physicist’s mental imagery in a way that will re-emerge later in the process of scientific creation. »

— Interview with French astrophysicist & poet Jean-Pierre Luminet in Le Temps, April 2019