Physics in the Arts, Third Edition offers new, quantitative descriptions of color that are different and unique. Tactics included work for the color mixing of lights and paints, both quantitatively and predictively. Suitable for a course on sound and light for non-science majors, this completely updated text covers light waves, reflection and refraction, lenses, the human eye, photography, color and color vision, additive and subtractive color mixing, structural color, sound waves, simple harmonic motion, damping and resonance, vibration of strings, waves in pipes, superposition, Fourier analysis, and more. This book provides artists, humanists and liberal arts students with an engaging exploration of the physics of light and sound, particularly with regard to color and music.

Author Biography

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 Ecole Polytechnique Federale 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.