University of Connecticut physics professor Ron Mallett hopes to one day build a working time machine.
Mallett, who is a respected physics professor, claims to have written a scientific equation that can serve as a basis for time travel - a concept he became obsessed with as a child after reading The Time Machine by writer HG Wells.
This is a goal he has pursued for most of his life, and while the 74-year-old admits that he is unlikely to see time travel become a reality during his lifetime, chances are that his efforts will contribute in no small measure to the creation of a working machine. time in the future.
In 2018, Mallet put together a prototype device designed to showcase some of the principles associated with his concept of time travel.
The device has a ring of lasers, and the idea is to "twist" the space inside the ring. According to Mallett, since time and space are inextricably linked, the curvature of one must also deform the other.
“If the space is twisted hard enough, this linear timeline will be twisted into a loop. If time suddenly turns into a loop that allows us to travel into the past,”he said.
However, making a fully functional version of a device will require an extremely large amount of energy and a way to miniaturize all the components - two obstacles that it still has to overcome.
There is another problem - one that greatly interferes with his dream of traveling back in time to see his father, who tragically died of a heart attack when he was just 10 years old.
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“You can send the information back,” he said. "But you can only send her back to the point at which you turn on the car."
In other words, according to his understanding of the physics of time travel, time travel can only be achieved between the present moment and the time in which the time machine itself was first activated.
So for Mallett, traveling back in time to see his father seems to be impossible.