SciArt Magazine - All Issues February 2016 | Page 10

direct contact. The 17th century fascination with space
and the motion of planets in the solar system certainly
influenced the assertive spatial characteristics of Baroque art. Such artists as Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci had a profound effect on Stella’s art, and he wrote
compellingly about their spatial and movement discoveries in Working Space (1986).7
In the late 19th century, Lord Kelvin admitted that
the natural state of vortices was instability and decay.
But these properties were found incompatible with the
longevity of the atomic model. Thus, with the advent
of modern physics, fit seemed that the last dream of
interpreting the structure of the physical world with a
mechanical vortex model had died. From the early 20th
century until 1960, deep theorists had little interest in
vortex dynamics, and fluid dynamics experts were generally found in university engineering departments. Practical interest in turbulence remained, but in most cases
studied, it was oriented toward practical solutions with
which to make turbulence go away. In most engineering
situations, turbulence meant disaster—turbulent airflow
over an airplane wing destroys lift and turbulence in an
oil pipe creates problematic drag. In the early sixties, a
few physicists and mathematicians began to work