A Life Devoted To Time Travel

by Mike Miliard
Traveling to the future is easy - but finding your way to the past is a bit more complicated.

Traveling into the future is easy. Anyone familiar with Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity knows a moving clock ticks slower than a stationary one. So it’s simple, really. All you have to do is build a spaceship that moves nearly as fast as the speed of light, pump it with enough fuel for a very long round-trip voyage, and head for the stars.

By the time you return to Earth, say in five years as marked by the clock onboard your light-year-traveling spaceship, you’d have aged only that five years while everyone and everything else on Earth has aged considerably more.

But who wants to go to the future? Nowadays, it’s terrifying even to ponder what the headlines will be tomorrow.

Certainly not Ronald Mallett. For more than 50 years, he’s been obsessed with finding a way to return to the past. Specifically, to the Bronx, in 1955. That’s the year his father, Boyd Mallet, died.

Mallett’s lifelong mission? To traverse spatiotemporal continuum and warn his dad to take better care of himself. To tell him to kick the two-pack-a-day habit that helped lead to the fatal heart attack he suffered at the age of 33.

The overwhelming shock of his father’s death caused Mallett, now 63, to disconnect from reality, he says.

So when, at age 10, he started building a jury-rigged jalopy, based on the gyroscopic contraption on the cover of the Classics Illustrated version of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, it might have seemed as if he had gone over the edge.

Image: Since losing his father 53 years ago, Mallett has devoted his life to building a time machine in order to revisit him

But the next decades only saw Mallett’s focus on his mission intensify with laser-like precision. He devoured every book on Einstein he could find. He boned up on differential equations and tensor calculus. And by 1973, at Penn State, he’d earned his Ph.D.

On Mallett’s cluttered desk sits a small placard: “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.” A bit of geek humor. But Mallett knew that there was nothing in the laws of physics that said time travel was impossible. And now his groundbreaking theories about the nature of space-time are about to be borne out in a Connecticut laboratory.

Many scientists have wondered about the possibility of time travel, says Dr. Philip D. Mannheim, a UConn professor specializing in particle and field theory who occupies the office next to Mallett’s, but it’s always “only ever been at the theoretical stage. Ron is one of the people who is actually setting out to do it. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. The theoretical ideas that we have seem to permit it. But nonetheless, you still want to see it happen. And that’s what Ron is doing. He’s worked through Einstein’s theory of general relativity to find a way to apply these ideas in a tractable situation.”

Mallett is convinced that time travel will become a reality sooner rather than later. “What I’m doing, I like to think of as analogous to the Wright brothers,” he says. “They sent this rickety craft across a few hundred yards of beach. But with the technological acceleration that happened after that, by the middle of the century we had intercontinental air travel. This is only the beginning. Once it can be shown to be done, even in the simplest case, then what we learn from that will be incredible.”

The Death Of Superman

“My father was in the Second World War,” notes Mallett. “He was with the troops that went across the Rhine.” Upon coming home, Boyd Mallett used the GI Bill to attend the RCA Institute, where he learned to fix TVs. He was good at it, and he’d often be called to the Manhattan apartments of the stars of the day. “Walter Matthau, Jackie Cooper - he was like television repairman to the stars,” Mallett remembers with a laugh.

Boyd Mallett gave his son gyroscopes and a crystal radio set to play with. He pried open the guts of the family TV set and taught him the rudiments of how it worked.

And then, just like that, he was gone.

“My whole world literally revolved around him,” says Mallett. “He looked like this strong, robust man. When he died of this massive heart attack, it was as though the impossible had happened. He was like Superman. I was just in a daze.”

Mallett stayed that way for a year. Until one day he happened across that copy of The Time Machine. The words spoken by that unnamed time traveler - “Scientific people know very well that Time is only a kind of Space” struck Mallett like a bolt from the blue.

“That you can move forward and backward in time, just as you can move forward and backward in space - I knew that this was the solution to my problem,” he says. “I read it again and again and again.”

And when the time machine he cobbled together didn’t work, “I figured, maybe I just needed to know more.” It wasn’t long before Mallett got his hands on a paperback version of Lincoln Barnett’s The Universe and Dr. Einstein which puts the concepts of Einstein’s abstruse relativity theories in as plain English as possible. “I knew if I could understand what Einstein was saying,” says Mallett, “then maybe I could put that together with this desire to build a time machine.”

Living Two Lives

The rest, as they say, is history. (Or, depending when you’re reading this, the future.) Mallett was never particularly mathematically inclined. “It was a pain in the neck when my father would make me go through the multiplication tables before I could get my allowance,” he says. But after his dad’s death, he willed himself to like numbers.

“Because I had this goal, this mission, I realized I was going to have to do it,” says Mallett. “I knew science and math were going to be the keys.” Serendipitously, if pure arithmetic was a crashing bore, Mallett found he had a natural affinity for complex analytical math. “For some reason, just the way my mind works, it came to me with little effort whatsoever. I would just do it for fun. Literally, I just was thrilled by it.”

Yet despite Mallett’s numerical perspicacity, the world wasn’t exactly an open book when he graduated high school in 1962. He was shy and socially awkward. He’d never been kissed. And, of course, he was a working-class African-American whose single mother was struggling to support four kids.

Mallett joined the Air Force. After dodging racist taunts in segregated Biloxi, Mississippi, during basic training, he was transferred to Lockbourne AFB in Ohio, where he studied electronics and computers and, in his free time, took correspondence courses in advanced math and pored over the entrancingly beautiful equations of Schrödinger and Gödel.

Upon his discharge from the service, Mallett landed in Happy Valley (a/k/a/ Penn State), where he’d go on to earn his bachelor’s, his master’s, and his Ph.D. He joined the physics faculty at UConn in 1973, and has been there ever since.

But for at least the first two-and-a-half decades he spent in Storrs, Connecticut, he lived in what he describes now as “the closet.” Even when he was a boy, building a time machine out of junk in desperate hope of reuniting with his dad, Mallett recalls, “I was astute enough to realize that people were worried about me, and somehow I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell them I wanted to build a time machine.”

As an academic at a large university, he felt doubly compelled to keep his mission under wraps. After all, a physicist confessing to one’s colleagues that he wants to build a time machine is akin to a professor of zoology wanting to take a leave of absence to search for Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster.

Indeed, Mallett often felt like he was living two different lives. By day, he was a jovial faculty member, conducting lectures, advising grad students, and penning provocative papers about black holes, gravitation, and quantum cosmology that were published to plaudits in peer-reviewed science journals.

At night, he’d return home, playing Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence over and over again as he filled notebook after notebook with blizzards of scrawled equations, despairing that an answer was just out of reach.

“It played havoc with my personal life,” he confesses. “I think it eroded my first marriage. To the people at UConn I would be upbeat, everything was going fine, but when I would go home, I went into these very depressed moods. My whole reason for being - my whole reason for being a physicist - was so I could see my father again.”

The Sweetness Of Technology

Mallett had an equational epiphany of sorts in 1999. And it was not long after, he says, that, “in a sense, I was dragged out of the closet.” The ideas behind his eureka moment are complicated for the layman, but suffice it to say that they’re based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity - as opposed to Einstein’s special theory mentioned above - and have to do with the gravitational twisting of space (and, ideally, time) by directed beams of light.

But just as this breakthrough seemed to advance him closer than he’d ever been to his dream of a father-son reunion, the cold sting of logic put the kibosh on Mallett’s exuberance.

Yes, time travel was theoretically possible. And yes, he seemed to have found a way to make it happen. But, he realized suddenly, any time machine built based upon his theories would only allow a traveler to return to the moment the machine was switched on. Ipso facto, it would be impossible to travel back to a time before the machine was invented.

It was cold comfort that that fact still provided a satisfying rebuttal to the age-old argument against the existence of time travel which went, “If it exists, why haven’t we been visited by people from the future?” Because it also meant that Mallett could not possibly travel back to 1955. He would never see his father again.

When I ask if this revelation crushed him, Mallett is philosophical. “It wasn’t devastating. It was sad. But here’s the thing: there’s a notion of what’s called the ‘sweetness of technology’ - that is to say, just knowing that you can do it, and that you have been able to do it. That was inspired by my father.” That understanding, he says, was enough to make all his long decades of work worthwhile.

And it was gratifying, too, to see his colleagues and fellow physicists validating, or at least not debunking his findings. Mallett’s ideas have been politely received - albeit sometimes with a raised eyebrow - and, to date, no one has found fault with his calculations. “It’s because my work is anchored in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This is not ‘Ron Mallett’s Theory of Time Travel.’ That’s why my colleagues have taken it seriously.”

Twisting Time

Edward Farhi, the director of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics, isn’t familiar with Mallett’s work, but takes a dim view of time travel’s plausibility.

Yes, “there’s absolutely not the slightest doubt that time is a flexible thing,” he says. “And there’s also not the slightest doubt that you could go into the future. But what seems to be unlikely, or impossible, is for you to go back in time. I’ve seen no evidence for it in anything I’ve studied in physics. I’ve seen evidence against it. If you could go back in time, the whole causal structure of physics would change: presumably you could affect things before they occurred, and it’s very hard to imagine a consistent way of doing physics if that could happen.”

Nonetheless, recent years have seen Mallett - in a relatively rare collaboration between theoretical and experimental physicists - working with his UConn physics colleague Chandra Roychoudhuri, a research professor who specializes in lasers, on a prototype that might test his theories, which involve laser beams twisting space and time into a traversable loop.

He’d be starting small. “Not only do you want high-intensity laser beams, but over a very small region,” he explains. “The effect becomes greater the smaller the area.”

If that experiment succeeds, then it would be on to the next - trying to confirm that that twisting of space leads to the twisting of time.

The idea is to drop tiny neutrons into that tortioned space. If Mallett’s theories held water, the subatomic particles would travel fractions of a second backward in time.

The actual science behind all this is dauntingly complex. And though he once took out a provisional patent for what he called a LOTART (Laser Optical Time Machine and Receiver Transmitter) an early-warning device that might allow the reception of signals from the future that could warn us of disasters, Mallett concedes that any practical implementation of his ideas is a ways off.

But, he asserts, his theories are sound. “Any criticisms I’ve had have not been about the physics of it. They’ve been questions like, ‘Are you going to harness enough energy to do this?’ Technological, engineering questions. Not fundamental physics questions.”

No, Ronald Mallett isn’t building a sleek metallic vessel, into which some intrepid explorer could step for a quick jaunt to the Pleistocene Epoch. “What I have developed is the basic equations that show there is a beginning,” he says. But “the amounts of energy and technology that will be needed for human time travel are going to be extremely great.”

Also, it’s very expensive. Just the start-up costs for these experiments exceed a quarter of a million dollars. To actually see everything through to completion might cost $11 million.

“What we need is a major benefactor, on the level of Bill Gates,” says Mallett. He sees no reason why someone with loads of filthy lucre shouldn’t want to help. After all, in a world where the much-ballyhooed Large Hadron Collider cost $10 billion, $11 million is pocket change. “This potentially could be a complete revolution in the way the world is,” he says. “That money would be a drop in the bucket for them.”

Moved by the intensely personal nature of his quest, Spike Lee announced this past summer that he’s currently writing a screenplay for a movie - which he’ll direct - based on Mallett’s book Time Traveler.

Mallett is hoping the Spike Lee film will help pique people’s interest enough to get some capital flowing. Or, if you’re so inclined, feel free to kick in a few bucks via the Space Time Twisting By Light project’s homepage at http://www.phys.uconn.edu/~mallett/main/funding.htm

Meanwhile, his work continues. And as he still thinks back constantly to his father in 1955, he also has no trouble whatsoever imagining the temporally transformative advances that could occur by 2155.

“It’s going to happen,” says Mallett, wending his car through the foliage of northeastern Connecticut as the setting sun glows orange in the west. “It’s really just a matter of time.”

. . .

http://thephoenix.com/


A Layman’s Guide To The Science Of Time Travel

In 1916, Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity. His special theory of relativity had come first, propounded in his annus mirabilis of 1905; one of that idea’s basic premises is that the faster a clock moves, the more it slows down.

This has been demonstrated by putting one atomic clock on a passenger jet circling the globe while keeping another one stationary.

More than a decade of number-crunching later, Einstein unveiled another idea.

Image: Mallett’s time-travel equations are based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity

If his special theory was concerned primarily with motion’s effect on time, his general theory had to do with gravity’s. One of the latter’s basic upshots, says UConn’s Dr. Ronald L. Mallett, is that “the stronger gravity is, the more time will slow down.”

In other words, at the earth’s surface, where gravity is stronger, time runs slower than at higher altitudes, where it’s not.

This too, has been demonstrated. That’s why clocks aboard GPS satellites have to be calibrated to account for the difference - only fractions of a second, but hugely significant fractions nonetheless - between time in space and time on earth.

So there’s that - the notion that gravity can affect time.

And there’s also this - Isaac Newton surmised that it was only matter that created gravity - the earth creates gravity which keeps us stuck to the ground, and the sun creates gravity that keeps the earth orbiting around it.

But Einstein had other ideas.

“In Einstein’s theory, not only can matter create gravity, light can create gravity too,” says Mallett. “Light doesn’t have mass, but light has energy. The energy of light can create gravity.”

So, if gravity can change time, and light can create gravity, then light can affect time.

Suddenly, Mallett felt like Archimedes in the bathtub. And, after much cogitation and scribbling, he came up with a theory of his own. “What I found was that, if you circulate beams of light - directed light, like lasers - this causes the empty space around which the light is circulating, to get twisted.”

The best illustration of this is a cup of black coffee. If the liquid represents space, a stirring spoon would be akin to Mallett’s laser beams, swirling it around.

And, if that sort of causation in space could be proven, the next step would be to drop something tiny, like a neutron particle. Mallett’s theory is that, in that twisted space, just as a sugar cube would swirl around the coffee mug, the neutron particle would travel back in time.

“In Einstein’s theory, space and time are connected to each other,” Mallett says.

“Whatever you do to space, also happens to time. So, time normally flows in a straight line, from the past to the present to the future. But as space is getting twisted around, if it gets twisted around strongly enough, what will happen is that timeline will get twisted into a loop. So you can see what’s going to happen: if you’re traveling along that loop in time, you can go from the future back to the past.”

(Editor’s note: The author, Mike Miliard, is a staff writer at the Boston Phoenixan and an irrational Red Sox fan.)

. . .

http://thephoenix.com/

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