Loop dreams

After losing his father when he was 10, Ronald Mallett read HG Wells and Einstein - and resolved to investigate whether time travel is possible

- DANIEL LAVELLE

Ronald Mallett thinks he has cracked time travel. The secret, he says, is in twisting the fabric of space-time with a ring of rotating lasers to make a loop of time that would allow you to travel backwards. It will take a lot more explaining and experiments, but after a half century of work, the 77-year-old astrophysicist has got that down pat.

His claim is not as ridiculous as it may seem. Entire academic departments are dedicated to studying the possibility of time travel. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on a “time-reversal machine” to detect dark matter. There are still lots of physicists who believe travelling to the past is impossible, but it is not the sci-fi pipe dream it once was.

But the story of how Prof Mallett, now emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, reached this point could have been lifted from a comic book. A year after losing his father, Boyd, at the age of 10, Mallett picked up a copy of H G Wells’s The Time Machine and had an epiphany: he was going to build his own time machine, travel back to 1955 and save his father’s life.

Mallett still idolises his dad, and thinks about him every day. He had been exceptionally close to Boyd, whom he describes as a “renaissance man” who would try to inspire curiosity in Mallett and his two brothers and sister. “When he passed away, it was like this light went out. I was in shock,” Mallett says down the line from his study in Connecticut.