Physicist Reveals His Secret Time Machine Project

Dr. Ronald Mallett has been working on a time machine since he was 10.

John Nikolai, Boston Phoenix

Dr. Ronald L. Mallett, a tenured theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut, has been holding on to a big secret for most of his life. Only the 79th African American to receive a doctorate degree in physics, Dr. Mallett spends his days lecturing and writing about subjects well within the normal scope of science. Yet, when he gets home every night, he turns his considerable intellect towards building his lifelong pet project: a functioning time machine.

Mallet's father passed away suddenly when he was a child, and for some reason he latched on to the idea of inventing a time machine so he could go back and warn his father about the dangers of smoking (a factor in his death).

The "overwhelming shock" of his father's death caused Mallett, now 63, to "just 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.

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. 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.

So, did Mallett actually build his time machine? Not exactly, but the unique theories that he has developed over the years have brought the concept of time travel closer to reality -- and we think his father would be plenty proud of that.

More on Dr. Mallett's fascinating story can be read at The Boston Phoenix.

Geoffrey Gardner

Tags: einstein | ronald mallett | theory time travel | time travel

11:48 AM ET | 11- 7-2008 | permalink

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