Q & A: Ronald L. Mallett, Time Travel Expert

Ronald L. Mallett, a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, claims to hold the key to going back to the future. Raised in New York and Pennsylvania, Mallett received his education at Pennsylvania State University and has taught and researched in Storrs, Conn., since 1975. Here, he takes FM for a little ride back in time in his own life as well as a look into what he hopes will come to fruition in the near future.

FM: What first made you interested in time travel?

Ronald Mallett: My father, who I love very deeply, died of a heart attack at 33. I was 10 years old and completely devastated. I think I would have become a depressed child, except that I found hope in the idea of time travel. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine was like a saving for me. I became obsessed with the idea of traveling back in time so that I could save my father. He smoked heavily and lived life too fully, I suppose. An interesting coincidence is that he died in 1955—the same year that Albert Einstein died. As I read about Einstein and his idea that time is absolute, I clearly knew I had a lot to learn about math and science. But this started me on my journey of researching the concept of time travel.

FM: How does your theory work?

Mallett: Well, it’s based on Einstein’s theory of relativity. That is the most important thing to know. The whole proposal comes down to a circulating beam of light that will twist time, which we think of as a straight line, into a loop. Imagine then that you can travel along this loop—or from the future to the past. My new work, my contribution, has been to show that this is possible through laser beams.

FM: Where in time would you travel?

Mallett: Unfortunately, the way my theory works is only from the time the “machine” is first started. So, for example, if I turned on an experiment today, someone next Thanksgiving could travel back to the Fourth of July (2002) or to today, but not to yesterday because the “machine” wasn’t on and working yesterday.

Ideally the first place I would go would be to see my father and warn him of the dangers he faced. But given what I have just explained, this unfortunately isn’t possible with my creation of time travel. Luckily, however, I think we will eventually encounter advanced civilizations on other planets through space travel. So perhaps they created a time machine a thousand years ago, and this would allow us to travel to points in our own distant past. In that case, I would love to visit ancient Rome as it was and see how people lived. See what Plato looked like. The future doesn’t excite me as much as the past does.

FM: How are you putting your theory into practice?

Mallett: I am a theoretical physicist, but an experimental colleague and I are working together currently. We are using photonic crystals, which is cutting new technology, that trap light. The crystals allow us to study the possibility of time travel first at the subatomic level, which uses less energy. Right now the experimenting is slow-going because I am teaching full-time but the experiment idea is itself very well developed. We are hoping to get funding this fall after working extensively on it once classes end. I think the government will be very interested in our work for larger projects. If we can show at this much smaller level that time travel can occur, then I think we will be able to have it at the human level.

FM: Have you always so intensely researched time travel?

Mallett: Most of my papers are on black holes and cosmology, but time travel has been my main research area since 1998. Before that, I was afraid my colleagues would think I was out to lunch. What got me to come out in the open was meeting Fred Adams, an astrophysicist at University of Michigan who was writing a popular book and encouraged me to do the same about time travel. As I researched for that book, I discovered dozens of papers written by colleagues at Princeton, Caltech and elsewhere. This made me more comfortable to pursue my research, for I knew that there were other academics who supported the idea.

Of course, there are always skeptics, and that is good. But I’ve been invited to different fora and to be the keynote speaker at a forum at Harvard later this month. All of this is very encouraging. In science it’s always good to really have to prove your theory to everyone—especially the skeptical—and that is what I hope to do. My family also is incredibly supportive. They are very proud of and pleased with me and all my work.

FM: Do all the bad jokes and misrepresentation of time travel in the media irk you?

Mallett: Oh, no! One should never take oneself too seriously. Sometimes it is necessary to keep things lighter. For instance, in my presentation at the Boston Museum of Science last week I used cartoons to lighten things up. What is important to understand, however, is that when time travel does happen there will have to be strict government regulation. Everything has a good and a negative side to it. Even your car—it’s great to have it, but it could be used to run someone over. So, ultimately there will be things like Timecops, but that will have to be very tightly regulated by the government. I’d love to think that someone could travel in my lifetime, maybe 10 to 20 years. But, then, I don’t really know how long I’ve got.