Mallett talks time travel at science center

In a sold-out hall at the new Connecticut Science Center, in front of an audience ranging from elementary school students to elderly museum patrons, Ronald Mallett made a reality of something normally thought of as science fiction - the idea of time travel.

Mallett, who is a physics professor at the UConn and has had three papers published in accredited scientific journals, showed how such a machine might be brought to life.

The lecture started with an explanation of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which puts forth the idea that time is effected by motion and is a cornerstone of Mallett's work. The theory was proven in a little-known experiment at the United States Naval Observatory in the late 1970s. In the experiment, scientists put four atomic clocks on standard passenger jets, and compared them to a clock left at the observatory.

What happened, Mallett said, is that the clocks placed in the jets lost a small amount of time compared to the observatory's clock. The end result is that an astronaut in a theoretical spacecraft going nearly the speed of light could venture to a far-off planet and return to be younger than his children, essentially traveling forward in time, Mallett said.

For Mallett, however, traveling forward in time is not enough. Mallett, whose father died of a massive heart attack when Mallett was 10 years old, wants to go in the other direction.

Doing so, he said, would require a "ring laser" - a laser device reflected through a series of mirrors until it eventually hits itself. The space inside the ring laser would be dragged around, much like coffee being stirred by a spoon, Mallett said. Such a time distortion would be measured using subatomic particles.

According to Mallett, what would then occur is the formation of a "time loop" that would enable the sending of information to an earlier point in time. It is unknown what would happen to living matter put into the time loop, and no human tests would be conducted, Mallett said.

Mallett also discussed the idea of time paradoxes when using a time machine, invoking the popular "grandfather paradox," where a time traveler goes back in time and stops their grandparents from meeting, thus preventing their own birth and their ability to travel back in time.

Mallett said that the answer to this paradox lies in quantum physics, which dictates that rather than altering the current time stream, the traveler would be sent to a split universe where they had never been born, averting a paradox. To further prevent paradoxes from occurring, once a traveler leaves for another point in time, they can never return to the universe from which they originally came, Mallett said. He stressed that although this is the current explanation for what would happen, there is no way to know for certain until a machine is built and operational.

The rest of Mallett's appearance was spent deftly answering questions from the audience on every subject from UFOs and extraterrestrial time travelers to the probability that your own descendants have traveled back in time and are observing your every move. The presentation ended with the question of whether Mallett would go back in time if human time travel was possible. "I would in a heartbeat," he said.

Mallett has published a book titled "Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality," which is currently being made into a major motion picture by Spike Lee.