Moshe Carmeli (Hebrew: משה כרמלי, 1933–2007) was the Albert Einstein Professor of Theoretical Physics, Ben Gurion University (BGU), Beer Sheva, Israel and President of the Israel Physical Society.[1] He received his D.Sc. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 1964.[1] He became the first full professor at BGU's new Department of Physics.[2] He did significant theoretical work in the fields of cosmology, astrophysics, general and special relativity, gauge theory, and mathematical physics, authoring 4 books, co-authoring 4 others, and publishing 128 refereed research papers in various journals and forums, plus assorted other publications (146 in all).[1] He is most notable for his work on gauge theory and his development of the theory of cosmological general relativity, which extends Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity from a four-dimensional spacetime to a five-dimensional space-velocity framework.
In 1972, Carmeli then returned to Israel as an associate professor of physics at Ben-Gurion University in the newly established Physics Department. In 1974, he was elevated to full professor, making him the first full professor in the Physics Department. During this period, from 1973 to 1977, he also served as the department's chairman.[1][2]
In 1979, he was made Albert Einstein Professor of Theoretical Physics, a title he held for the remaining 28 years of his life. The following year, he became the Director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at BGU, a position he held until 1989. From 1979 to 1982, he was the Vice President of the Israel Physical Society, and then became the President of the Society through 1985.[1]
In the 1990s, Carmeli developed a new cosmological theory called cosmological general relativity. He took Einstein's theory of general relativity and extended it into five dimensions, adding the radial velocity of galaxies expanding in the Hubble flow as the fifth dimension. This fifth dimension is known as space-velocity.[3] He published his initial special relativistic version of the theory in 1997 in his book Cosmological Special Relativity: The Large-Scale Structure of Space, Time, and Velocity.[3] He then developed the complete general relativistic theory called cosmological general relativity, publishing several papers on its implications over the next decade.
