Physics in the Arts

Pupa Gilbert is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and an amateur surrealist painter. She is a physicist with passionate loves for biology, geoscience, and modern art. She studied at the Sapienza University of Rome, worked as a staff scientist at the Italian National Research Council and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne until she joined the University of Wisconsin in 1999. Her research focuses on biominerals, including coral skeletons, tooth enamel, nacre, and sea urchin spines. She studies them with spectromicroscopy methods at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, where she discovers the complex structures of the biominerals, and their formation mechanisms. She won several awards for her research and teaching, including the UW-Madison Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011, Radcliffe Fellowship 2014-15, and the David A. Shirley Award in 2018. She lives in Madison and Berkeley with her husband Ben.

1. Light and Light Waves 2. Reflection and Refraction 3. Lenses 4. The Human Eye 5. Photography 6. Color and Color Vision 7. Additive Color Mixing 8. Subtractive Color Mixing 9. Color Generating Mechanisms 10. Sound Waves 11. Simple Harmonic Motion 12. Damping and Resonance 13. Vibration of Strings 14. Waves in Pipes 15. Superposition, beats, and Harmony 16. Musical Scales 17. Fourier Analysis 18. Musical Instruments 19. Sound Perception: Timbre, Loudness, and Pitch 20. The Ear 21. Solutions to Problems