Professor Fulvio Melia Publishes New Book on Cosmology

Fulvio Melia, Professor of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Math at the University of Arizona, has published his next book: The Physics of Cosmology. The book will be available for sale on April 1, 2026.

Pre-order now at shop.elsevier.com.

About the Book:

We have become accustomed to hearing about discovery upon discovery in support of the standard model of cosmology, only to be perplexed with subsequent announcements of equally exciting and compelling observations claiming that our views on the origin and history of the Universe are clearly wrong. Well, which is it? Is evidence growing in favor of our current cosmological paradigm, or is it beginning to soundly reject it?

The culprit, as it turns out, is the righthand side of Einstein's equations, which he referred to as `low-grade wood'. All attempts at improving the standard model of cosmology aim to remove this weakness in the cosmic spacetime underlying all measurements and their interpretation in this field. This book focuses on a precise identification of the cause of the disagreement between theory and the data, which unfortunately is often misrepresented or poorly explained to the public and professional audiences.

But the book goes beyond a mere description of the conflicts now faced by the standard model, and attempts to update Jim Peebles' highly influential book, Physical Cosmology, the well-known reference text used to study the fundamental underpinnings of theoretical cosmology in the latter part of the twentieth century.

It adopts the many valuable lessons gleaned from the exquisite work of the cosmology community measuring, stretching, dissecting and collating the myriad pieces of data informing our overall view of the cosmos, and updates the traditional energy-momentum tensor used in the standard model to produce a more consistent theoretical framework. 

Prof. Fulvio Melia is a theoretical cosmologist, with the primary goal of correctly interpreting the many high precision data now being made available by observations. He has published seven books in physics and astronomy.  Cracking the Einstein Code received the 2009 PROSE Award from The Association of American Publishers. The Edge of Infinity was selected as one of the year's best astronomy books in the 2005 Annual Special Issue of Astronomy. And The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy was selected as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Books of the year by the American Library Association. 

He is finalizing two more books that will be released towards the end of 2026.