Time travel has been one of the biggest tropes in science fiction for years. But what if you could actually go back in time and visit a loved one before their death? There’s, obviously, a lot we don’t know about what kind of consequences time travel might bring to the table, but that hasn’t stopped physicist Ron Mallet from a lifelong obsession with trying to figure out the time travel equation.
What’s even more impressive about this lifelong endeavor, though, is that Mallet now claims to have solved the equation and figured out how to build an actual time machine. Mallet’s inspiration and obsession with time travel originally began when he was much younger, Earth.com notes. Following the death of his beloved father, Mallet lost himself in novels, including The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
It was this book, and others, that helped fuel the obsession that would lead Mallet down a career in physics, trying to figure out just how to work the time travel equation and build a machine capable of going back through space and time. Like many of the characters in iconic science fiction media, Mallet’s obsession with time travel all boils down to the hope that he would be able to see his father once more.
It is certainly a respectable goal, especially for anyone who has lost someone they loved dearly. Mallet says that his idea of a time machine centers around an “intense and continuous rotating beam of light” that can manipulate gravity. A device built by him, following his equation, would use a ring of lasers to mimic the effects of a black hole, which appears to distort space and time around them.
Of course, learning the time travel equation and building a working time machine are two different things altogether. Sure, scientists have simulated black holes in a lab once or twice, but never anything with the kind of power or reality-effecting pull that Mallet seems to think would make time travel possible. That isn’t to say that he’s got things wrong, though.
His equation for time travel may be exactly what is needed to break through this lifelong obsession and actually travel back in time. But building something capable of testing it is going to be a whole separate endeavor in and of itself.
