Ronald Mallett

Speaker: Chuck Rolando (Standard American accent)

Ronald Mallett’s childhood ended when he was only 10 years old. In May 1955, his father Boyd, a radio and television repairman, collapsed and died of a massive heart attack in the family home inthe Bronx. He was 33 years old. Ronald, his oldest son, was devastated, but he also began to form an idea: what if he were able to travel back in time, talk to his father and warn him, tell him to go to the doctor and have his heart checked, to stop smoking and to work less?

A PERSONAL OBSESSION

Fast forward to today and that boy is now one of the USA’s first African-American university professors of theoretical physics, Dr. Ronald Mallett. That tragic event over half a century ago started a lifelong quest to build a time machine:

Dr Ronald Mallett (Standard/African American accent):

About a year after he died, when I was about 11, I came across H. G. Wells’book, The Time Machine. And I have to say that that was the thing that saved me because I was in a very depressed state, and I had this notion that, if I could build a time machine, then I could go back into the past and see him again, and maybe save his life, tell him what was going to happen. So that became an obsession for me, was the notion of trying to build a time machine. And I tried to do it in a childish way, as a matter of fact, putting, you know, things together, radio parts and things like that, but nothing, you know, worked, of course, but I remembered that in the book it said that scientific people know about how to do this, about travelling through time. And so I realised it was just a lack of knowledge.

ONE MAN’S MISSION

Dr Mallett is currently trying to raise the first quarter of a million dollars needed to test the science he has spent his life working on. The story is brilliantly told in his 2007 memoir TimeTraveler: A Scientist’s Personal Missionto Make Time Travel a Possibility. Spike Lee, the African American director par excellence, is currently working on a film adaptation. Ronald Mallett admits that he is a theoretical physicist who is merely providing the theory for whoever would like to make his STL (Space-timeTwisting by Light) project a reality. Applying the work of Einstein, which Mallett first discovered at the age of 12, and the theory of black holes, he has come to believe that a ring laser can be used to bend space and therefore time. Nor is he alone: other theoretical physicists have developed time travel theories which involve “wormholes” and “cosmic strings.” As Mallett explains, a time machine could not save his father, but it could help warn humanity of danger in the future:

Dr Ronald Mallett:

All of these attempts, which are, you know, different from mine, but they all have the same limitation, and that is to say that you can not go back in time earlier than whenever the device, or the phenomena, occurs. And if you think about that, that makes sense because it’s the device that’s creating the effect. So, if I turned it on today, for example, leave it on for 100 years, someone 100 years from now could send information back, 75, 50, you know, all the way back to now, but they could not go earlier than that because it’s the device, in my case the circulating light, that’s creating the effect. So I can’t use this to go back and see my father again, which was my original goal.