Ronald Mallett's father died when he was 10. But Mallett, now 69, has never stopped trying to reconnect. Bloomberg has a feature on University of Connecticut physics professor's quest to build a time machine that would allow him to send a message back to his father. He knows it sounds crazy, but he thinks his machine is on the verge of a breakthrough and is seeking $250,000 from investors to make it work.
Mallett, who works in theoretical physics, has published paper after paper on the feasibility of sending messages backwards in time. Here, Mallett describes one of his proofs of concept:
Essentially, he believes that he can bend space enough that it bends time as well. And he has a purpose in mind: he wants to warn his father of a heart attack that took his life .
Mallett is fully aware of how that sounds. In fact, he hid his interests from colleagues for years for fear of being seen as a quack. In 2001, he finally published a paper on the possibilities for (backward) time travel.
In part, it seems that Mallett's approach (for now) is to create closed time-like curves, which make it possible to send a message back through the machine, but only to such a time that the gravitational field was turned on. Theoretically, this means that messages could come in the second it was turned on.
Mallett has been beating the drum of time travel for almost 15 years. He thinks the technology is just 10 years off at this point. If he's wrong, he'll be another in a long line of researchers hoping for the seemingly impossible breakthrough that opens a door to the past. But why not try?
Source: Bloomberg
