Back to the future? A New England professor shares his time travel theory

Technology

Ronald Mallett, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, is most known for his theory on how time travel is possible.

Ronald Mallett has dedicated a majority of his life to finding a way to travel through time — and while one may assume his passion was spurred by movies like “Back to the Future,” Mallett’s motivation was a lot more personal.

Mallett, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, is a theoretical physicist most known for his mathematical theory on how time travel is possible — and shared how he said it can be made a reality.

Early life and education

Mallett, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, grew up in the Bronx, New York, as the oldest of three siblings, and was extremely close with his father, Boyd. Working as a television repairman and described as a “wonderful father” by Mallett, Boyd had a sudden heart attack at 33 years old in 1955, when Mallett was 10.

“It shattered my life,” Mallett said.

Mallett’s father was a “stickler” about education, and Mallett turned to reading for comfort. Then, he came across the book that changed his life: H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine.” In the book, it describes that time is the fourth dimension in the three-dimensional space, and one can move forward and backward in the time dimension as you can in the other three.

“Maybe if I had a time machine, I could go back into the past and see [my parents] again and tell them what was going to happen,” Mallett said. “I became obsessed with the notion of having a time machine.”

Without the means to go to college, Mallett enlisted in the Air Force in the final years of the Vietnam War, with an intention to use the GI Bill to fund his higher education. After being in the Air Force for four years, Mallett went to the University of Pennsylvania and eventually earned his PhD in 1973 at 28 years old.

He became an assistant professor at UConn two years later, became a full time professor in 1987 with multiple distinctions, and retired in 2024. But Mallett said he would not have gotten to where he was if he shared his intentions to study time travel. 

“I kept it a secret because I thought if I told people I wanted to build a time machine, they would think I was crazy,” Mallett said.

He instead focused on studying black holes, a topic another one of his inspirations, Albert Einstein, theorized about. In his theory, Einstein suggested a black hole can also affect time as it collapses and sucks in the gravity that surrounds it.

Mallett’s time travel theory

Einstein’s theory of General Relativity suggested that light can create gravity, since photons carry tons of energy, and can interact with gravity. In the same theory, Einstein suggested that the stronger gravity is, the slower time moves, something he referred to as time dilation.

“My breakthrough was to realize that if gravity can affect time, and light can create gravity, then light can affect time,” Mallett said.

Mallett showed mathematically that if a beam of laser light can move in a circular path, time can be twisted in a loop. This finding was published in Mallett’s 2006 autobiography “Time Traveler,” the first time Mallett spoke publicly about his time travel fixation.

There are limits to the theory, though. Mallett said that, if a time travel machine were ever to be built, the machine could be turned on for a period of time, and people in the future could travel back in time all the way up to the point that the machine was turned on.

This finding, unfortunately, concluded that it would not be possible to go back in time that has already occurred, so Mallett’s hope to see his father again is not theoretically possible yet.

“The dream is that maybe some future scientists or some future time travelers would be able to come back, and I would be able to use their device to go back to my distant past and to my father’s time that he was alive,” Mallett said.

Roadblocks for Mallett’s theory

Mallett said the basics of his time travel equation has not changed in the nearly two decades since his book published, but he has developed other aspects of it to show other possibilities.

But Mallett’s time travel theory is just that — theoretical. To test out the theory, Mallett said he would need funding “on the scale of millions of dollars.”

“As far as making it a practical reality, it’s going to require that we decide that we really wanted to do it and we’re willing to expend the financing to get it done,” Mallett said.

But that’s a tall order, according to Ken Olum, a research professor of physics and astronomy at Tufts University who, with fellow Tufts professor Allen Everett, wrote a paper in 2005 in response to Mallett.

Olum previously researched time travel himself through wormholes but concluded that it is “impossible under the theories of physics that we understand.”

Olum points to two issues he noted in the paper: The scale of the machine would need to be larger than the visible universe and, when the intensity of light is equal to zero, it creates a gravitationally intense singularity that should not form naturally.

“There’s no possibility that he’s going to construct some kind of a time travel arrangement here on Earth, or that any future civilization is going to construct such a thing,” Olum said.

But Mallett is still hopeful that such technology will be developed in the future for humanity’s benefit.

“I have a feeling that my work will have established [time travel] as a real possibility,” Mallett said. “Future generations will be able to use this to control time and control our destiny in a positive way that we can’t even begin to imagine.”