Turning Grief into Physics: Dr. Ronald Mallett’s Journey Through Time

Gabrielle Birchak/ November 11, 2025/ Archive, Future History, Modern History

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS

Gabrielle Bir­chak

I just fin­ished edit­ing this fan­tas­tic inter­view with Dr. Ronald Mal­lett, Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut. This episode of Math Sci­ence His­to­ry is all about explor­ing one of physics most dar­ing fron­tiers, time trav­el. Dr. Mal­lett has spent a life­time inves­ti­gat­ing whether light itself can twist space time enough to form loops in time. In this episode, we trace the per­son­al moment that set him on his path and unpack the rel­a­tiv­i­ty behind trav­el­ing to the future and the past. So let’s step into the lab and maybe, just maybe, out­side the clock. Dr. Ronald L. Mal­lett, a the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist who spent decades study­ing Ein­stein’s equa­tions takes us on an extra­or­di­nary jour­ney from the spark that lit his obses­sion with time trav­el as a child in the Bronx to his rev­o­lu­tion­ary idea that light itself could twist space and time into a loop. In this episode, he unpacks the sci­ence of rel­a­tiv­i­ty in a way that is both mind-bend­ing and acces­si­ble and reveals how time real­ly behaves under speed and grav­i­ty and shares the per­son­al and philo­soph­i­cal dri­ve behind his research. From worm­holes to frame drag­ging, from heart­break to hope, this con­ver­sa­tion asks, can imag­i­na­tion and math­e­mat­ics real­ly take us back to the moments we’ve lost?

As pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut, Dr. Mal­lett spe­cial­izes in Ein­stein’s gen­er­al the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty and has pub­lished numer­ous papers on black holes and rel­a­tivis­tic cos­mol­o­gy in pro­fes­sion­al jour­nals. Pro­fes­sor Mal­let­t’s break­through research on time trav­el has been fea­tured exten­sive­ly in the media around the world, includ­ing print media, such as New Sci­en­tist, Boston Globe, the Hart­ford Courant, Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine, the Wall Street Jour­nal, and broad­cast media, such as NPR’s This Amer­i­can Life, the His­to­ry Chan­nel, the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Chan­nel, the Sci­ence Chan­nel, CNN, and a num­ber of pod­casts, includ­ing mine, yay!

Mal­lett has also been fea­tured in major BBC doc­u­men­tary, The World’s First Time Machine, and appeared in a fea­ture-length Cana­di­an doc­u­men­tary called How to Build a Time Machine, which won Best Doc­u­men­tary at the 2017 New York City Sci-Fi Film Fes­ti­val, and both doc­u­men­taries are avail­able on Ama­zon Prime. Pro­fes­sor Mal­let­t’s pub­lished mem­oir, Time Trav­el­er, a sci­en­tist’s per­son­al mis­sion to make time trav­el a real­i­ty, has been trans­lat­ed into Kore­an, Chi­nese, and Japan­ese, and the mem­oir is cur­rent­ly in dis­cus­sion to become a major motion pic­ture. So with­out fur­ther ado, my lis­ten­ers, enjoy this inter­view that I have with Dr. Mal­lett on his book, on his the­o­ries, and the real­i­ty of time trav­el. Dr. Mal­lett, thank you so much for join­ing us here at Math, Sci­ence, His­to­ry. We’re very grate­ful for your time.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Well, thank you for hav­ing me on.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

We’re gonna be dis­cussing your the­o­ries and work on time trav­el, and for the record, I’ve read your book mul­ti­ple times. Oh, wow. I’m a big fan.

For my lis­ten­ers who are meet­ing you for the first time, could you share how your father’s pass­ing set you on this life­long path toward know­ing that physics was the key to under­stand­ing time travel?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Yeah, I’d be hap­py to. I grew up in the Bronx, New York, and I was the old­est of four chil­dren, and my father, by the way, he served in the Sec­ond World War as a bat­tle­field medic, but he decid­ed to go into the mil­i­tary and went into elec­tron­ics on the GI Bill after he came out. He was a tele­vi­sion repair­man, and he was very, very good at his job.

I mean, a lot of peo­ple who were younger, but also peo­ple who were old­er rec­og­nized the name Wal­ter Matthau. My father actu­al­ly fixed his tele­vi­sion set at one time. Yeah, and I have an auto­graphed pic­ture of that.

But the thing is is that, for me, the sun rose and set on him. He spent a lot of time with me. He would do things like give me toys like a gyro­scope, crys­tal radio set, I mean, things like that that real­ly enter­tained me, and he would explain things to me.

And I think he was inter­est­ed in me even­tu­al­ly going into the busi­ness with him because he began show­ing me things behind the tele­vi­sion set. He looked healthy. He looked strong.

He looked robust. What we did­n’t know as chil­dren is that he had a weak heart, and he died sud­den­ly of a mas­sive heart attack. And to say I was dev­as­tat­ed is actu­al­ly an understatement.

I mean, I went from being a real­ly hap­py kid to being a very depressed kid. But among the gifts that he left me was a love of read­ing. I should men­tion he was only 33 years old when he died.

I was 10 years old, and that was the first time I faced death, and it just was incom­pre­hen­si­ble. It was like Super­man had died. And the thing is is that about a year after he died, when I was around 11, I came across a Clas­sics Illus­trat­ed ver­sion of what was called The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This is a copy of it. And the thing is is that I read it on the first page. It said that sci­en­tif­ic peo­ple know very well that time is just a kind of space, and we can move for­ward and back­ward in time just as we can in space.

And when I read that, I thought if we can move for­ward and back­ward in time, maybe I could go back into the past and see him again and tell him what was gonna hap­pen, maybe change things. So my moth­er had kept his tele­vi­sion and radio parts, and I used the cov­er of the mag­a­zine to try to put some­thing jer­ry-rigged togeth­er. And of course, when I plugged it in, noth­ing hap­pened, which was prob­a­bly just as well, prob­a­bly would have burned the house down.

But the thing is is that I was dis­ap­point­ed, but not dis­cour­aged. I thought, you know, it said sci­en­tif­ic peo­ple know very well. So I knew sci­ence was gonna have to play a role, but I did­n’t know what that meant.

But as I said, I loved to read. In fact, I loved read­ing more than eat­ing. I mean, lit­er­al­ly, I would spend mon­ey that my moth­er gave us for get­ting lunch­es on going to the Sal­va­tion Army and get­ting books and things like that.

And one time I went in and I saw this paper­back and it had a pic­ture of Ein­stein on the cov­er. Now, I knew Ein­stein was this great genius. I did­n’t know what he did, but I knew he was this great genius.

And next to him was an hour­glass. So I knew that maybe this meant that Ein­stein had some­thing to do with time. And maybe that might relate to time machines.

So what I did was I got the book. I was about 12. It was a pop­u­lar­iza­tion, but I could­n’t real­ly get the details.

I just did­n’t have the back­ground. But I did pick up the essence of what it said. It said that Ein­stein said that, unlike the the­o­ries of New­ton, who had said that noth­ing can change time, Ein­stein said there are ways you can alter time.

So I thought if I could under­stand what Ein­stein meant by that, alter­ing time, then maybe that would lead me to see­ing whether or not a time machine could be built. So Ein­stein became my sec­ond pas­sion. And that was the beginning.

I knew I was gonna have to go to col­lege even­tu­al­ly, but that was­n’t, and I should men­tion that after my father died, we went from doing well to pover­ty. It was hard. This was in the 50s.

And my moth­er, she was African-Amer­i­can and it was hard for her to get any kind of a job. And it was only the most medi­al jobs that she could get. And for­tu­nate­ly for us, that we had sub­si­dies from the GI Bill and things like that, that helped us going.

But what I did was fol­low father’s foot­steps. He had gone into the mil­i­tary and I went into the Air Force after high school. And even­tu­al­ly I used the GI Bill to go to Penn State University.

And that’s where I got my bach­e­lor’s, mas­ter’s and PhD in physics. I should men­tion though that, remem­ber once again, this was in the 50s when he died. And I should men­tion, there’s an inter­est­ing coin­ci­dence in me that’s always kind of haunt­ed me a lit­tle bit.

My father died in May of 1955. Ein­stein died in April of 1955. So they died just a month apart from each other.

And I can remem­ber even before my father died, see­ing in the New York Times, a pic­ture of Ein­stein and say­ing, talk­ing about his death. In the very next month, my father had passed away. But in any case, I knew that peo­ple were wor­ried about me.

Now, sci­ence fic­tion was not that big a thing as it is now. And I thought that if I told peo­ple that I want­ed to build a time machine, they might not think that, they might say there’s some­thing wrong with this kid. So I actu­al­ly kept it a secret.

I did­n’t men­tion it at all to peo­ple. And even­tu­al­ly when I went into physics, I decid­ed I was gonna have to use a cov­er sto­ry. And the cov­er sto­ry I used was black holes.

It turns out that black holes were a cre­ation of Ein­stein’s the­o­ries. And black holes can affect time. And the thing is, is that black holes were con­sid­ered crazy, but nor­mal crazy, where­as time trav­el was crazy, crazy.

So I thought, well, if I stud­ied black holes, I could make that as my career. And at the same time, I would be study­ing about Ein­stein’s the­o­ries about time and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of time trav­el. So that’s what I did.

And even­tu­al­ly I did make a break­through. I even­tu­al­ly became a fac­ul­ty mem­ber at Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut in the physics depart­ment. And even­tu­al­ly due to my work in black holes, I even­tu­al­ly got tenure and became a full professor.

Then the nice thing about tenure, and I always say that’s impor­tant, because it allows you to go a lit­tle bit off beat, okay? And you’re pro­tect­ed by doing that. And so after I was able to become a full pro­fes­sor and reach the top of the aca­d­e­m­ic lad­der, I decid­ed I could come out of the time trav­el clos­et, so to speak.

And that’s when I actu­al­ly made my break­through. And that was at the begin­ning of this cen­tu­ry. But the core of my work is Einstein.

And it’s based on that. We can go into that, but that’s the begin­ning for me. It was the death of my father that led me into this.

And even­tu­al­ly I did make a breakthrough.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Your father was a tremen­dous inspi­ra­tion in your life.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

That’s won­der­ful. Yes.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

And as a quick side note, I’m just gonna share this real­ly quick. Wal­ter Matthau went on to play the role of Albert Ein­stein in the movie IQ with Matt Ryan.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Yes. In fact, yes, I saw that movie and I thought about that. In fact, I kept a pic­ture from that, you know, because I thought, isn’t that inter­est­ing how that related?

I mean, it came out.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Yeah, it all, it’s like a closed time-like loop. It just all connects.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Thanks for, you know, men­tion­ing that Gabrielle, because that was some­thing that I thought about at the time.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

This is a very broad ques­tion, but what is time and what is the sci­ence behind time trav­el? Because that’s what is so inspir­ing about your work. You make it sci­en­tif­ic and not just some­thing in our imaginations.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Oh, thank you. Yeah. Well, the way I think of time, if I was to give a quick def­i­n­i­tion, it’s the per­sis­tence of existence.

And what do I mean by that? Is the thing is, is that it has to do with dura­tion. And I’ll use an exam­ple that was actu­al­ly used in the time machine.

Sup­pose that you have a cube, okay? A cube has length, width, and breadth. Those are three dimensions.

But if the cube did­n’t have an exis­tence, if it did­n’t endure, then it would­n’t exist. So it has to have a fourth dimen­sion, the dimen­sion of time. It has to endure.

So to me, that’s what I mean by the per­sis­tence of exis­tence. Some­thing has to per­sist in order to exist. And that’s what time is.

So time is the per­sis­tence of exis­tence. That’s the fourth dimen­sion. That’s what I think of it as.

But now as far as the sci­en­tif­ic basis of time, of time trav­el, that is, Ein­stein devel­oped two the­o­ries. The first the­o­ry was devel­oped in 1905. It’s called the spe­cial the­o­ry of relativity.

And to put that in a nut­shell, what Ein­stein said is that time is affect­ed by speed. The faster we move, the more time slows down. Time for mov­ing clocks slows down.

Now, when I talk about clocks slow­ing down, I don’t mean just sim­ply mechan­i­cal clocks. Your heart is a clock, okay? It beats at a cer­tain rhythm.

Now, when you’re going down the high­way, trav­el­ing at 65 or 70 miles an hour, you don’t feel that. It’s peo­ple who see you zoom­ing by. It’s the same thing with this.

If you’re trav­el­ing very high speeds, you won’t feel time slow­ing down. You won’t feel your heart rate chang­ing. But peo­ple who are watch­ing you would actu­al­ly see your heart rate slow down, your metab­o­lism slow down.

In oth­er words, time would actu­al­ly slow down. For them, time is mov­ing along at a nor­mal rate, but they would see time for you as slow­ing down, okay? And so now you might say, has this been shown?

Not only has it been shown, there was actu­al­ly exper­i­ments on both the macro­scop­ic and micro­scop­ic. There’s a device that’s in CERN, Switzer­land, called the Large Hadron Col­lid­er. What it does is speeds up sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles, okay?

Some of these par­ti­cles only live for a very short peri­od of time, and then they just sim­ply dis­ap­pear. They dis­in­te­grate, okay? Now what they find is that when they speed these sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles up close to the speed of light, they can get these par­ti­cles to live 10, 20, 30 times longer than they nor­mal­ly would.

What that means is that their inter­nal clock is slow­ing down just exact­ly as Ein­stein pre­dict­ed. But not only that, we’ve seen it on a macro­scop­ic lev­el. This is some­thing that peo­ple aren’t gen­er­al­ly aware of.

Back in the 1970s, an exper­i­ment was done in which they took two atom­ic clocks. One of the atom­ic clocks, they kept at rest at the Naval Obser­va­to­ry. The oth­er atom­ic clock, they put on an ordi­nary pas­sen­ger jet and flew it around the world, close to the speed of sound.

When they brought it back, they found that the clock on the pas­sen­ger jet had actu­al­ly slowed down com­pared to the clock at rest at the Naval Obser­va­to­ry. This means that the sci­en­tists on board, their heart rate, their metab­o­lism has slowed down. Now you might say, how come this was­n’t in the New York Times and everything?

Well, the effect is so small, it can only be mea­sured with atom­ic clocks, okay? The thing is, is that it depends on speed. This effect hap­pens at any speed, by the way.

But the clos­er you get to the speed of light, the more dra­mat­ic it becomes, okay? So if we had rock­ets that can go close to the speed of light, and we are devel­op­ing rock­ets and that pos­si­bil­i­ty, then we would see the effect in a much more dra­mat­ic way. For instance, an astro­naut who’s trav­el­ing, let’s say, out to a dis­tant star that’s about, let’s say, 20 light years away from us, okay?

From the peo­ple here on the Earth, if they were watch­ing that astro­naut, it would seem to them as though it took 20 years for the astro­naut to go out and 20 years for the astro­naut to come back if they were going close to the speed of light. How­ev­er, for the astro­naut, time is slow­ing down. So when they come back, even though for the peo­ple on Earth, it would seem like it took them 40 years, for the astro­naut, it would seem like it only took 10 years.

So when the astro­naut came back, the astro­naut would only be 10 years old­er, where­as every­one else here on the Earth would be 40 years old­er. Now, it’s time trav­el. Time trav­el is when you have the per­son get into some device, and they come out in the future, and they haven’t aged very much, but every­one else has.

So that, and as I said, we’ve seen the baby steps of that with the exper­i­ment that was done at the Naval Obser­va­to­ry. So that is real. Time trav­el to the future is real.

And as I said, it’s based on Ein­stein’s spe­cial the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty. So once again, Ein­stein’s spe­cial the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty says that time slows down. But now, how about going back to the past?

Well, no mat­ter how fast you go, you can’t go back to the past. There is a speed lim­it, and that’s the speed of light. So you could get close to the speed of light, but you can’t get past it.

Inci­den­tal­ly, peo­ple thought that there was a speed lim­it on sound, and we broke the sound bar­ri­er. It turns out that the speed of light is a whole dif­fer­ent thing. It’s actu­al­ly built into the fun­da­men­tal struc­ture of the universe.

There’s a very famous equa­tion called E equals mc squared, which every child hears about. It just sim­ply relates ener­gy to mat­ter. It says that if I have a cer­tain amount of mat­ter, then it’s equiv­a­lent to a cer­tain amount of energy.

That equa­tion works because of the speed lim­it, okay? Now, you might say, well, how is that relat­ed to that? Well, sup­pose that I want to speed some­thing up.

Say I wan­na push some­thing and get to go faster, okay? To do that, I have to give it some ener­gy, okay? Now, Ein­stein’s equa­tion, peo­ple some­times think of Ein­stein’s equa­tion in terms of if I have a lit­tle bit of mat­ter, I get an enor­mous amount of energy.

That’s what E equals mc squared says. But the equa­tion can also be read in reverse. That is to say, if I have a cer­tain amount of ener­gy, that can give me a cer­tain amount of matter.

So when I try to speed some­thing up, okay, some of that ener­gy actu­al­ly goes into the mass of the object that I’m speed­ing. That means that object becomes hard­er, becomes more mas­sive. And so that means that if I wan­na get it to go even faster, I’ve got­ta give it more energy.

But when I give it more ener­gy, that ener­gy goes into mak­ing the object even heav­ier. So even­tu­al­ly, if I try to get that object to go at the speed of light, I would have to give it almost an infi­nite amount of ener­gy in order to get it to do that. And when you say that you need an infi­nite amount of ener­gy, that’s the same thing as say­ing you can’t do it.

So because of E equals mc squared, lit­er­al­ly that puts the lim­it on why we can’t just sim­ply accel­er­ate some­thing beyond the speed of light. So it’s built in, okay? That’s impor­tant to realize.

So it’s not, it’s just sim­ply a bar­ri­er. It’s part of the fun­da­men­tal laws of physics, okay? So how can we go back into the past?

And well, it turns out that Ein­stein devel­oped a sec­ond the­o­ry that leads to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of going back. His sec­ond the­o­ry was called the gen­er­al the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty. And it took him 10 years to devel­op that.

The first the­o­ry was devel­oped in 1905. It was 1915 that he came out with the sec­ond. You might say, why?

Well, he had to devel­op a whole new math­e­mat­i­cal set of equa­tions, okay? Extreme­ly com­pli­cat­ed set of, the math­e­mat­ics is called ten­sor cal­cu­lus. But the point is is that, what is that new the­o­ry that he had to develop?

Well, it has to do with grav­i­ty. Now, let’s back up here. What do I mean by that?

Well, when Ein­stein devel­oped his spe­cial the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, he tried to apply it to every­thing. And it turned out that the one thing he was­n’t able to get it to work was grav­i­ty. Now, why was that a problem?

Well, let’s go back to how the rela­tion­ship between us, grav­i­ty, and the sun. We know that we’re 93 mil­lion miles away from the sun, okay? And the earth, the grav­i­ta­tion­al force of the sun keeps us in orbit around.

Now, sup­pose that some cos­mic cat­a­stro­phe were to destroy the sun. What would we see? And I use that in a very spe­cif­ic way.

What would we see? Well, we know that it takes eight min­utes for light to get from the sun to the earth. So that means that if the sun were destroyed, we would not see that for a full eight minutes.

In oth­er words, we would actu­al­ly see the sun still sit­ting there in the sky. But if the sun was destroyed, grav­i­ty, accord­ing to New­ton, would shut down imme­di­ate­ly. So we would have the fol­low­ing weird consequence.

We would actu­al­ly still see the sun sit­ting out in the sky, but since the sun isn’t there any­more, real­ly, grav­i­ty is shut down, we would be hurtling off in space. So that’s a con­tra­dic­tion. We would be hurtling off in space, but we would still see the sun sit­ting out there.

Ein­stein said, wait a minute, that implies that grav­i­ty can trav­el faster than the speed of light. Because if grav­i­ty shuts down, that means that the effect of grav­i­ty could get to us before light could get to us. And so Ein­stein said, that means that there’s some­thing wrong with gravity.

He had to put a lim­it on why grav­i­ty can’t trav­el faster than the speed of light, accord­ing to his the­o­ry, the spe­cial the­o­ry. So he had to devel­op a whole new the­o­ry of grav­i­ty. And this whole new the­o­ry of grav­i­ty said that grav­i­ty isn’t real­ly a force, it’s a prop­er­ty of space.

What do I mean by that? Well, imag­ine that I have, let’s say, a rub­ber sheet, let’s say a small tram­po­line, okay? And let’s sup­pose that I take a bowl­ing ball and I put it on the rub­ber sheet, okay?

What does it do? It curves the rub­ber sheet, okay? Now, sup­pose I take a mar­ble and I put it on the rub­ber sheet.

Well, when I put the mar­ble on the rub­ber sheet, because the bowl­ing ball is curv­ing the rub­ber sheet, the mar­ble’s gonna roll down towards the bowl­ing ball, okay? Now, sup­pose that the rub­ber sheet is there, but it’s trans­par­ent. So the only thing you see is the bowl­ing ball and the mar­ble, okay?

So when I release the mar­ble, it moves towards the bowl­ing ball, but now you can’t see the rub­ber sheet. So some­how you would think that the bowl­ing ball is exert­ing some, direct­ly some force on the mar­ble, pulling the mar­ble towards it. But you know that’s not what’s real­ly happening.

Ein­stein said that’s what’s hap­pen­ing in space. The sun is like the bowl­ing ball. The sun is actu­al­ly bend­ing, warp­ing space around it.

The earth is mere­ly mov­ing along that warp, but we can’t see the bend­ing of space. So we think that the sun is actu­al­ly direct­ly pulling on the earth. It’s not.

So the thing is, is that what I can do is I can actu­al­ly show, you know, sort of an exper­i­ment that if I have the bowl­ing ball on the rub­ber sheet and I have the mar­ble, if I give the mar­ble a lit­tle bit of a side­ways motion, I can get the mar­ble to orbit the bowl­ing ball. That’s what’s hap­pen­ing to the earth. When the solar sys­tem was formed, the earth had a lit­tle bit of a side­ways motion.

So even though the sun was warp­ing the space, the earth was mov­ing along that curved space like a skater on a roller der­by track, okay? So that’s what grav­i­ty is. Grav­i­ty is actu­al­ly the bend­ing of emp­ty space by a mas­sive object.

Now that’s impor­tant because now let’s come back to the bowl­ing ball and the mar­ble. Sup­pose that I pull the bowl­ing ball sud­den­ly off the rub­ber sheet. What happens?

The rub­ber sheet vibrates a lit­tle bit when I pull it off, okay? What hap­pens when the sun is destroyed? When the sun is destroyed, it’s like it’s being pulled out of space.

And so space starts vibrat­ing a lit­tle bit. Now, remem­ber I said that grav­i­ty is the bend­ing of space. Those vibra­tions of space are what we call grav­i­ty waves.

Grav­i­ty waves are actu­al­ly the bend­ing of the oscil­la­tions of space. So what hap­pens is that if you cal­cu­late how long it takes for those vibra­tions from space to reach us, it takes eight min­utes, okay? So what that means is that what Ein­stein said is that if it’s any kind of a con­stel­la­tion, if the sun was destroyed, it would take eight min­utes for the grav­i­ta­tion­al effect to reach us as well as eight min­utes for the light to reach us.

So when the sun is destroyed, the effect of that would still be there, okay? Until it reach­es us eight min­utes lat­er. So when­ev­er the light goes out, the grav­i­ta­tion­al goes out and we go off into space, okay?

So that’s what’s his new the­o­ry is that grav­i­ty is actu­al­ly the bend­ing, the warp­ing of space. Now, this affects time as well. In Ein­stein’s the­o­ry, in fact, you hear some­times the phrase space-time.

What­ev­er you do to space also affects time. So that means the bend­ing of space shows up as the bend­ing of time. Now, what does the bend­ing of time mean?

That shows up with clocks being affect­ed by grav­i­ty so that a grav­i­ta­tion­al force will actu­al­ly cause clocks to slow down. Now, you might say, has this been shown? Not only has it been shown, it’s part of our every­day life.

I know that I have in my car, and you prob­a­bly do in yours, a GPS sys­tem. The GPS sys­tem works because of Ein­stein’s the­o­ry. How did that come about?

Well, it turns out that the way in which the GPS sys­tem works is the fol­low­ing. In your car, the unit has a clock asso­ci­at­ed with it. What hap­pens is that the satel­lites above the Earth, there’s a very sim­ple rela­tion­ship in physics between dis­tance, time, and speed.

If you know any two of those, you can com­pute the oth­er. So if I know the time the sig­nal was sent from the satel­lite, the time it reach­es my unit, and I know the speed of the sig­nal, I can com­pute dis­tance. When they did that, they were get­ting incor­rect distances.

Why? Because they were assum­ing that the clock on board the satel­lites were run­ning at exact­ly the same rate as the clock in your unit. Accord­ing to New­ton, noth­ing can affect time.

Accord­ing to Ein­stein, how­ev­er, the clock in your car, because grav­i­ty is stronger at the sur­face of the Earth, that clock is actu­al­ly run­ning a lit­tle slow­er than the clocks on board the satel­lite. They’re run­ning at dif­fer­ent rates because they’re at dif­fer­ent places in the grav­i­ta­tion­al field. You have to use com­put­ers to take that into account.

And so that is what’s done. So any­time I use my GPS sys­tem, I always give a silent nod to Ein­stein because with­out his the­o­ry, we would­n’t have GPS. So it real­ly has prac­ti­cal consequences.

So time is affect­ed by grav­i­ty. But now it turns out that because of that, there’s oth­er effects that are asso­ci­at­ed with that. Sup­pose that we have an object like a rotat­ing black hole.

Now I should­n’t men­tion what a black hole is. Most, I’m sure most lis­ten­ers may know, but a black hole real­ly isn’t as mys­te­ri­ous as it seems. It’s sim­ply an effect of col­laps­ing grav­i­ty of the object, the sun is a good example.

The way in which our sun oper­ates is that there’s a bal­ance, an inter­est­ing ener­gy bal­ance, essen­tial­ly a ball of hydro­gen gas sim­pli­fy­ing things. But what hap­pens is that the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull in this gas is pulling the hydro­gen atoms togeth­er. And then when they smash into each oth­er, they form helium.

There’s a lit­tle bit of a dif­fer­ence in mass from the result­ing heli­um from the hydro­gen. That lit­tle bit of mass that’s there is con­vert­ed into ener­gy from equals MC squared. And that’s where we get the ener­gy from our sun.

So the ener­gy from our sun is due to the result of the col­li­sion of the hydro­gen gas form­ing heli­um. Now, even­tu­al­ly what’s going to hap­pen is that that fuel is going to begin to get used up. Okay?

And what’s going to hap­pen is that things are going to be able to start shut­ting down. The grav­i­ta­tion­al force pulls inward. The heat from the gas is pushed outward.

Even­tu­al­ly that inter­nal ener­gy is going to get shut down. So that means the grav­i­ta­tion­al force is going to start dom­i­nat­ing. That means the star shrinks and collapses.

The grav­i­ta­tion­al force around it becomes greater. Even­tu­al­ly the grav­i­ta­tion­al force becomes so great that the light that tries to escape, we don’t nor­mal­ly think of light as hav­ing weight, but the light that tries to escape, the light gets pulled back. So if you’re stand­ing out­side the star and all the light that tries to get out of the star gets pulled back to the star, what do you see?

Noth­ing. That’s what a black hole is. A black hole is just sim­ply a star, a col­lapsed star that has col­lapsed to a point that all the light that tries to escape is pulled back.

And so all we see is a black hole. It would actu­al­ly look more like a black sphere in space. It turns out that, remem­ber that time is affect­ed by gravity.

So that means that if you were going close to a black hole, because grav­i­ty is becom­ing greater, time is slow­ing down more and more and more. If you got close enough to a black hole, time would almost come to a stop. It turns out that not only will that hap­pen, if a black hole is rotat­ing, then not only will time get pulled back, but time itself will get twisted.

The way of think­ing about that is the fact that, sup­pose that I had a strip of paper right now. And on the strip of paper, I drew a straight line. At the bot­tom of the strip of paper, let’s call that the past.

At the mid­dle of the strip of paper is the present. And at the top of the line is the future. Now, remem­ber this, I’ve drawn this time­line on a strip of paper.

So the strip of paper rep­re­sents space, and the time­line is in space. Now, what hap­pens is that the rotat­ing black hole will actu­al­ly cause space itself to get twist­ed. Think of it that way, I use an anal­o­gy of this, is that think of you have a cup of cof­fee, and think of the cof­fee as being like emp­ty space.

And think of your spoon as being like the rotat­ing black hole. So what hap­pens if I take the cof­fee and I stir it? The cof­fee starts swirling around.

That’s what the rotat­ing black hole is doing to emp­ty space. It’s caus­ing space to come swirling around. That means that, remem­ber, space and time are linked to each other.

So that strip of paper that’s nor­mal­ly going from straight line from the past, present, and future, that will get twist­ed into a loop. So imag­ine I take that strip of paper and twist it into a loop. I could go from the past to the present to the future, but I’ve made that strip of paper into a loop.

So I could go from the future to where? Back to the past. So by twist­ing space enough, I can twist time into a loop.

And along that loop in time, I can go back to the past. So that means that for a rotat­ing black hole, I could actu­al­ly use that as a time machine to go back to the past. That’s real.

That’s based on Ein­stein’s the­o­ry. And we know black holes exist. In fact, the Nobel Prize was won just back in 2017 for the real dis­cov­ery of black holes and grav­i­ta­tion­al waves, by the way.

So we do know that all of that is pos­si­ble. But now that’s out in space. Is it pos­si­ble for us to have a mech­a­nism that we can do here on the Earth?

Well, that’s where my work comes in.

Because what I was inter­est­ed in was that pos­si­bil­i­ty. So I had spent my life study­ing black holes. And so I knew all of these things.

And I should men­tion, I’m a the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist, I should men­tion. In physics, there’s a big dif­fer­ence between exper­i­men­tal and physics, and the­o­ret­i­cal and exper­i­men­tal physics. Ein­stein, for exam­ple, was a the­o­ret­i­cal physicist.

He did­n’t do exper­i­ments. What he did was he used equa­tions to describe how the uni­verse works. Exper­i­men­tal physi­cists actu­al­ly use equip­ment to see that this is the way the uni­verse real­ly works.

My work involves solv­ing Ein­stein’s equa­tions. And what I did was I want­ed to know, is there a way that we could find a way of twist­ing time that was dif­fer­ent from using a black hole? Well, it turns out there’s an effect in Ein­stein’s theory.

In New­ton’s the­o­ry, the only thing that can cre­ate grav­i­ty is mat­ter. The mat­ter of the sun keeps us in orbit. The mat­ter of the Earth keeps us ground­ed and so on.

But in Ein­stein’s the­o­ry, not only can mat­ter cre­ate grav­i­ty, but light itself can cre­ate grav­i­ty. Even though light does­n’t have mass, it can cre­ate grav­i­ty. Now, this is where my break­through came in.

If grav­i­ty can affect time and light can cre­ate grav­i­ty, then light can affect time, okay? And what I did was I uti­lized that in the fol­low­ing way. There’s a device, it’s a real device, it’s called a ring laser.

A ring laser is just sim­ply a device that takes a laser beam and caus­es the laser beam to go into a loop, okay? You can do this by hav­ing the light beam go off mir­rors. Now, what I did was I solved Ein­stein’s grav­i­ta­tion­al field equa­tions for a ring laser.

And what I found was is that it can cause a twist­ing of space itself. And what I did found was is that if you cause that twist­ing of space to become great enough, then you could actu­al­ly cause a twist­ing of time into a loop. So in effect, what you could do is cre­ate loops of time with a cir­cu­lat­ing beam of laser light.

So this was essen­tial­ly a laser-gen­er­at­ed time machine, and it’s all based on Ein­stein’s gen­er­al the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty. So that was my break­through, was to show that by using a cir­cu­lat­ing beam of laser light math­e­mat­i­cal­ly, you could cause a twist­ing of space and then even­tu­al­ly a twist­ing of time, which could allow you to trav­el back into the past. Now, that’s one thing, to show it math­e­mat­i­cal­ly is anoth­er thing to do it experimentally.

And that’s the same thing that hap­pened with Ein­stein’s equa­tion. Ein­stein’s equa­tion, for exam­ple, equals MC squared. That’s some­thing he came up with theoretically.

But to cre­ate that from the math­e­mat­ics to the exper­i­ment, that would prob­a­bly have nev­er hap­pened if it had­n’t been for the Sec­ond World War, because the cost of that was bil­lions of dol­lars. The Man­hat­tan Project is what led us to be able to go from Ein­stein’s the­o­ret­i­cal equa­tion to the real pos­si­bil­i­ty. It’s the same thing with my work.

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, I’ve shown that it’s pos­si­ble. The exper­i­ments, how­ev­er, have yet to be done because of the costs of the exper­i­ments. And that’s anoth­er sto­ry in itself altogether.

I always feel that, you know, it’s fun­ny. Here, we have been respon­si­ble for major, in this coun­try, for major break­throughs, but we seem always to do it in response to, to give you an exam­ple, atom­ic ener­gy was devel­oped in response to the Sec­ond World War. Sput­nik is anoth­er example.

The 1950s, 1957 is when the Rus­sians sent a lit­tle satel­lite out in space. Pri­or to that, we weren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in going into space. But as soon as we saw that lit­tle thing going around, around, we decid­ed we got­ta get on the train here.

And so we devel­oped that. So it’s always been this, and I always joke that, semi-joke, that if the CIA tomor­row found out that North Korea was inter­est­ed in time trav­el, I would prob­a­bly have more mon­ey than I knew what to do with for my exper­i­ments. So, but that’s just the way that it is.

But that’s where things stand right now.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

So you cre­at­ed a mod­el with Dr. Chan­dra Roy Choud­hury, the machine, is that the Lotart?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

No. Yeah, no, well, the thing is, is that the the­o­ret­i­cal device that I cre­at­ed, I cre­at­ed that math­e­mat­i­cal­ly. Chan­dra, who’s an expert in lasers, he became inter­est­ed in prov­ing my theory.

So what we did, though, was for the pur­pos­es of giv­ing peo­ple an illus­tra­tion of what it would look like, what we did was to cre­ate a device that isn’t a real work­ing device. In fact, there’s a num­ber of doc­u­men­taries that are out there that I’ve done. If peo­ple are inter­est­ed, in fact, there’s two major doc­u­men­taries that are both avail­able on Ama­zon Prime right now.

One’s called The World’s First Time Machine. That was a BBC doc­u­men­tary. And then there’s a Cana­di­an doc­u­men­tary that came out more recent­ly that’s called How to Build a Time Machine.

And as I said, both of those doc­u­men­taries are there. There’s a mod­el that they see there. And peo­ple have asked me about that.

That’s actu­al­ly not a work­ing device. That’s just sim­ply some­thing to illus­trate what it might look like if we had the fund­ing to actu­al­ly cre­ate it. So it’s not even a real­ly a prototype.

It’s just sim­ply a toy mod­el to show what it might look like if we did it. And then what you see is these beams of light that cre­ate a cir­cu­lat­ing beam, but that isn’t a work­ing device. As I said, that’s just sim­ply an illus­tra­tion of what a device might look like if we had the fund­ing to actu­al­ly cre­ate the device.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

See­ing both doc­u­men­taries, they’re fan­tas­tic. I’m curi­ous to know then, amidst the math­e­mat­i­cal appli­ca­tions, you talk about frame drag­ging and how that’s cen­tral to your theory.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Right.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

And I’m real­ly fas­ci­nat­ed with this. Would you mind explain­ing this to my listeners?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Sure, yeah.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

And why it’s so impor­tant to the physics of time travel?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Yeah, thank you, Gabrielle. Well, my work, for me, one of the ulti­mate goals was the time machine part. But lead­ing up to that is this notion of frame dragging.

What frame drag­ging means is the fact that, remem­ber I said that this cir­cu­lat­ing beam of light? The cir­cu­lat­ing beam of light actu­al­ly is caus­ing a twist­ing of space anal­o­gous to what I was say­ing before, if you had a cup of cof­fee. In this case, the space is still like the cup of cof­fee, but the spoon is like the cir­cu­lat­ing beam of light.

Okay? So when­ev­er you turn the cir­cu­lat­ing beam of light on, you actu­al­ly cause a stir­ring of emp­ty space. And that’s called frame drag­ging because you’re drag­ging the frame of ref­er­ence around when you turn the light beam on.

So that’s a twist­ing of space. So this twist­ing of space, and here’s the thing that for me is impor­tant, is that to show that is nec­es­sary because you have to have the twist­ing of space before you can get the twist­ing of time, okay? And math­e­mati­cians have a phrase that’s called nec­es­sary and suf­fi­cient conditions.

The nec­es­sary con­di­tion is hav­ing the cir­cu­lat­ing beam of light. The suf­fi­cient con­di­tion is hav­ing that beam of light intense enough to cause time to become twist­ed as well. But now why is this spin-off important?

It turns out that the frame drag­ging of space is actu­al­ly less expen­sive and is with­in our tech­no­log­i­cal means. Why would that be impor­tant? Let’s sup­pose that, I’ll give you a good exam­ple of that.

Sup­pose you’re sit­ting in a bath­tub and you want to get the bar of soap from one end of the tub to the oth­er. Okay, what do you do? You push the bar of soap through the water and it goes to the oth­er end of the tub.

Now, sup­pose you want to get it there faster. Well, one way that you could do that is in addi­tion to just push­ing it through, sup­pose you hit the water too. Then the water, the soap now that’s sit­ting in the water will be moving.

But now, so in addi­tion to push­ing the water going through the water, it will be going with the water. So it will be going a lot faster. So how do we trans­fer infor­ma­tion from one place to another?

All the means that we have now, the stan­dard means is we trans­mit infor­ma­tion through space no mat­ter what process you can think of. The infor­ma­tion is trans­ferred through space. Sup­pose that in addi­tion to trans­fer­ring infor­ma­tion through space, we trav­el, use space itself so that we push space, if we warp space so we could push space infor­ma­tion now would not only go through space, but it would go with space.

So we get an extra boost. So imag­ine if you did that, you could trans­fer infor­ma­tion much more rapid­ly by mak­ing it go with space as well as through space. Not only could that be, but that would even mean as far as trans­port­ing objects by warp­ing space itself, we could actu­al­ly get things to move, trav­el in space faster than they nor­mal­ly would just by going through space.

All of that is at the lev­el of what we could do now if the fund­ing was pos­si­ble. So that frame drag­ging effect that you’re talk­ing about is some­thing that has prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions at low ener­gy lev­els that don’t involve the direct thing of time trav­el as well. So I’m very pleased that you brought that up.

So the frame drag­ging by light effect is nec­es­sary as the basis for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of time trav­el, but it’s sep­a­rate from it. In oth­er words, it’s a nec­es­sary con­di­tion, but it hap­pens first, and then you have the time trav­el effect. So that is very important.

Frame drag­ging is a nec­es­sary con­di­tion, and it’s some­thing that we could pos­si­bly prove with­out a huge expen­di­ture of energy.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Yeah, imag­in­ing that fund­ing isn’t a con­straint, what would that look like to prove that?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Okay, well, the thing is is that the sim­plest exam­ple, com­ing back once again, I’m gonna use this anal­o­gy with a cup of cof­fee. I talked about the twist­ing of space. Now, you can’t see space, so you would actu­al­ly say, how do I know that space is actu­al­ly being twisted?

Well, let’s sup­pose we come back to the cup of cof­fee. Sup­pose that I drop a cof­fee bean into the cof­fee, and then I start stir­ring. What hap­pens is is the cof­fee will start drag­ging the cof­fee bean around, okay, right?

Now, in this exper­i­ment, what would be the anal­o­gy? Sup­pose I had a neu­tron. I did sev­er­al cal­cu­la­tions lat­er, and you could actu­al­ly do it with an electron.

If you had the cir­cu­lat­ing light going through fiber optics, you could actu­al­ly then use a sub­atom­ic par­ti­cle like an elec­tron. You don’t have to use a neu­tron. So let’s say I have a spin­ning particle.

Main thing is I put a spin­ning par­ti­cle in there. If you have a spin­ning par­ti­cle that has an axis of spin, okay, just like the Earth has an axis. When I put it in there, as I use the cir­cu­lat­ing light beam to stir space, space will drag the spin­ning par­ti­cle around.

So what I would see is I would­n’t see the space itself start­ing to twist, but I would see all of a sud­den when I turned on the cir­cu­lat­ing light beam, all of a sud­den I would see that spin­ning par­ti­cle, I would see its spin get­ting twist­ed. So its spin would be get­ting twist­ed because it’s being dragged around by the emp­ty space. That would be a direct and real engi­neer­ing way of see­ing that space is being twisted.

Does that answer it?

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Yes, it does. There’s a mul­ti­tude of ways I’m sure we can accom­plish some­thing like that.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Oh, yeah.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

So we’ll find you a cou­ple mil­lion dollars.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Well, peo­ple lis­ten­ing to your pod­cast who have deep pock­ets, that would be great.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

That would be fan­tas­tic. I know that it was con­sid­ered out­landish in your time ear­ly on for not bring­ing up that you want­ed to cre­ate a time machine. What did you observe over the years that encour­aged you to final­ly come out of the time machine closet?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Yeah, well, the thing is is that there were oth­er physi­cists who were look­ing at these things who had high creds with­in the com­mu­ni­ty. One of them, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize, Kip Thorne is his name. And he was one of the peo­ple who had looked at these things that are called wormholes.

Worm­holes are like tun­nels in space, okay? And what you might think of is if you had two black holes that were in dif­fer­ent parts of space and you had a tun­nel con­nect­ed to them, okay? So you could go into the black hole this way and then come out of the oth­er one.

But what he found was that if you look at this math­e­mat­i­cal­ly, it turns out that there are ways that you can use the worm­hole by using a twist­ing of the worm­hole’s mouth. You could actu­al­ly set things up in such a way that when you send some­thing in, when it comes out, it could actu­al­ly see itself going in, okay? So it could actu­al­ly see the past.

So that was time trav­el, essen­tial­ly, to the past. And at Prince­ton, there’s a man named Richard Gott, who’s a the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist. And what he showed is that there’s these masses.

They’re actu­al­ly, you might say, strings that were formed from the Big Bang. They’re just sort of strings in space. They’re actu­al­ly cos­mic strings.

These are dif­fer­ent from the oth­er type of strings in par­ti­cle physics. But these cos­mic strings, and what he said is that if these cos­mic strings are mov­ing past each oth­er, they could cause loops in space and loops in time, okay? So what I was begin­ning to see is that peo­ple who were respect­ed in the com­mu­ni­ty were actu­al­ly talk­ing about ideas that might be relat­ed to time travel.

And so that, and then there was actu­al­ly anoth­er physi­cist who’s actu­al­ly a math­e­mati­cian. This actu­al­ly hap­pened very much ear­li­er. His name is Gödel.

He actu­al­ly proved some­thing called the inde­ter­mi­na­cy equa­tions in math­e­mat­ics, okay? Equa­tions of unde­cid­abil­i­ty. Essen­tial­ly, what he was real­ly, I don’t want to com­plete­ly cut up his the­o­ry, but essen­tial­ly the essence was was that you can’t com­plete­ly prove how com­plete a set of equa­tions are with­in the set itself, okay?

There’s always some­thing that’s unde­cid­able. You have to go out­side that the­o­ry, sort of a meta the­o­ry, in order to prove the com­plete­ness of the the­o­ry before it. But one of the things is, he was a col­league of Ein­stein, by the way, at the Insti­tute for Advanced Study.

Dr. Kurt Gödel? Yeah, that’s right. That’s Kurt, that’s right.

That’s the famous Kurt Gödel. And the thing is, is that for Ein­stein’s birth­day, 50th birth­day, what he did was to solve Ein­stein’s equa­tions, grav­i­ta­tion­al equa­tions. He said, if you have a rotat­ing uni­verse, what he was able to show math­e­mat­i­cal­ly was that this rotat­ing uni­verse would cause loops in space, and these loops in space could lead to loops in time.

And so he actu­al­ly even states explic­it­ly that with­in this rotat­ing uni­verse, it could be pos­si­ble to trav­el back into the past. So for me, hav­ing peo­ple like Gödel say­ing, you know, that Ein­stein’s the­o­ry could lead to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of time trav­el to the past, that boost­ed my con­fi­dence in that pos­si­bil­i­ty. Now, there’s still one oth­er aspect that’s asso­ci­at­ed with this, because now I feel com­fort­able, okay?

And I feel on sol­id ground because of the fact that my work is based on Ein­stein’s the­o­ry, and I have all these oth­er peo­ple that I can point to who have been look­ing at this. But one of the ques­tions that still comes up does­n’t have to do with the math­e­mat­ics, but has to do with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of para­dox­es with­in the notion of time trav­el to the past. Time trav­el to the future, there are no contradictions.

There’s no prob­lem. You go to the future, every­one else is still stuck in the past, so you can’t affect things, okay? You just arrive in the future and see how things have changed while you were gone, so to speak.

Sup­pose that you go back to the past and pre­vent your grand­par­ents from meet­ing each oth­er. Then your grand­par­ents don’t have your par­ents, and your par­ents don’t have you because they don’t exist. So if you don’t exist, how did you go back to the past and pre­vent your grand­par­ents from meet­ing each oth­er, okay?

That’s called the grand­fa­ther para­dox, where you go, the most inter­est­ing exam­ple of that is in Back to the Future, where Mar­ty McFly, you know, his moth­er is falling in love with him, you know, rather than with his future father, and that’s not sup­posed to hap­pen, okay? And so he starts to van­ish, I mean, but that’s the grand­fa­ther thing. Well, it turns out that physics itself has a way around this that has to do with the oth­er pil­lar of physics.

Mod­ern physics is based on two major pil­lars. One is rel­a­tiv­i­ty, the oth­er is quan­tum mechan­ics, and if you think rel­a­tiv­i­ty is strange, you haven’t seen noth­ing yet when you’re deal­ing with quan­tum mechan­ics, okay? And it turns out that quan­tum mechan­ics has its own, there was a physi­cist, Hugh Everett III, back in the 50s, what he want­ed to do was to apply quan­tum mechan­ics to the uni­verse as a whole, because he thought there were cer­tain prob­lems that were with the stan­dard the­o­ry of quan­tum mechanics.

Sup­pose that this after­noon, you’re try­ing to decide, you go to for lunch, and you look at the menu, and you see item A on the menu, and you see item B on the menu, and sup­pose you decide on hav­ing item B, okay? At that instant, it’s a Gabrielle who has cho­sen item A in anoth­er sep­a­rate uni­verse. That oth­er uni­verse is just as real as this uni­verse, but there’s two sep­a­rate you.

There’s one that has cho­sen item B, and one who’s cho­sen item A. We now pop­u­lar­ly call this the par­al­lel uni­verse idea. He orig­i­nal­ly called the mini-world inter­pre­ta­tion, and what it says, essen­tial­ly, is that what­ev­er you do, no mat­ter what it is, its oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ty occurs as well.

Now, there was a physi­cist at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty named David Deutsch who looked at this pos­si­bil­i­ty from a math­e­mat­i­cal stand­point and applied it to time trav­el, and what he found was the fol­low­ing. Sup­pose that you trav­el back to the past, okay? At the instant you trav­el back to the past, there’s a split of the universe.

You arrive in a par­al­lel uni­verse. In that uni­verse, you pre­vent your grand­par­ents from meet­ing each oth­er. That’s okay, because you weren’t even born in that universe.

You just now will find your­self in a strange uni­verse in which you’re in that uni­verse, but you nev­er occur in that uni­verse, okay? But remem­ber, I said there was a split. That oth­er uni­verse, you don’t arrive in, and that oth­er uni­verse, since you don’t arrive in it, your grand­par­ents meet each oth­er, have your par­ents, and your par­ents have you.

The upshot of it is, what he said is, is that you can trav­el back to the past, but the past you arrive in is not the past that you came from, so you don’t cre­ate any para­dox­es because of that.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Wow, okay, that’s a per­fect workaround. That’s amazing.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Yeah, and that’s based on quan­tum mechan­ics, so that’s one pos­si­bil­i­ty. Now, you might say, which is it? Well, the only way we’re going to find out is once we do the exper­i­ments, but once we do the exper­i­ments, then we will actu­al­ly know whether or not this occurred, but the main thing is that Ein­stein, the ulti­mate point is that Ein­stein’s gen­er­al the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty does lead to the real pos­si­bil­i­ty of time trav­el to the past, and it’s now just going to be us to see how that plays out.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Let me ask you this then. I know the answer to this, but I would love for my lis­ten­ers to hear this. What would be the real-world appli­ca­tions of this mech­a­nism, this machine work­ing, and how could it ben­e­fit society?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Right, well, the first part is that, as I men­tioned, we already talked about the frame-drag­ging part has obvi­ous pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions as far as com­mu­ni­ca­tion and trans­porta­tion is con­cerned, but the time trav­el por­tion for me is that, you know, think about tsunamis, earth­quakes, you know, all these nat­ur­al dis­as­ters that occur. Imag­ine if we could have, and COVID, for exam­ple, the pan­dem­ic, imag­ine if we could have advanced infor­ma­tion about these things, okay? Would­n’t that be worth it?

I mean, think of the mil­lions and thou­sands of lives that we could save by that. What the pos­si­bil­i­ty of time trav­el gives us is a pos­si­bil­i­ty of con­trol­ling our des­tiny in a way that we can’t even begin to imag­ine, so just from that stand­point alone, it’s worth look­ing at and look­ing at the possibility.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

So going back to the para­dox­es, there’s some­thing that you bring up in the book, and I under­stand that we will know that time trav­el is real the day we cre­ate the time machine. Is that correct?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

That’s a very good point. The thing is is that time trav­el, ter­res­tri­al time trav­el, has a lim­i­ta­tion. That is to say that when we see the movies, and I should men­tion that I’m a big fan of time trav­el movies.

Any­time there’s a new time trav­el movie com­ing out, I’m gonna be there to see it. But I sep­a­rate that from real­i­ty, okay? To give a good exam­ple, Ter­mi­na­tor is a good example.

You know, you have Schwarzeneg­ger all of a sud­den appear­ing in the past, okay? Not real­ly, because there’s a device that cre­at­ed these loops, okay? And before the device was turned on, there weren’t loops in time.

You turn the device on, and that’s when they begin. It’s like hav­ing your tele­vi­sion set. You can’t get some­thing from your TV before you turn your tele­vi­sion set on, okay?

That’s called causal­i­ty. The effect has to hap­pen after the cause. What that means is that if I turned on the device today, these loops would start being created.

And if I left it on, let’s say, 10 years, some­one 10 years from now could trav­el back or send infor­ma­tion back all the way back up to the time the machine was turned on, but they can’t send it ear­li­er than that because the device did­n’t exist ear­li­er than that. So it actu­al­ly answers a ques­tion that Stephen Hawk­ing had brought up. Time trav­el to the past is possible.

How come we’re not inun­dat­ed with time trav­el tours? The answer to that ques­tion is that the machine has­n’t been built yet that allows for that, okay, so that’s the real pos­si­bil­i­ty. That’s the real lim­i­ta­tion, but does that mean that we could­n’t get vis­i­tors from the future?

Not nec­es­sar­i­ly. You might say, well, why not? Remem­ber, this uni­verse that we’re liv­ing in, one of the things that physi­cists since the 90s is the fact that there are oth­er solar sys­tems than ours.

There are oth­er suns that have plan­ets around them. Now, believe it or not, pri­or to the 90s, we did­n’t know that there were oth­er plan­ets that had their own oth­er suns that had their own plan­ets around them. These are called extra­so­lar planets.

This is now a real sci­en­tif­ic area of study. What is believed now is that there are prob­a­bly con­di­tions with some of these that have life. As a mat­ter of fact, physi­cists like to give these things col­or­ful names, that these plan­ets, these extra­so­lar plan­ets that prob­a­bly could sup­port life are called Goldilocks systems.

That is to say that the plan­ets aren’t too close, so they’re not too hot, or they’re too far away, so they’re not too cold. They’re just right around their suns. So the uni­verse is prob­a­bly teem­ing with life.

Now, some of these plan­ets may have devel­oped life so that those civ­i­liza­tions are extreme­ly advanced and may have cre­at­ed time machines or devices that had been turned on thou­sands of years ago. If we were to able to find these plan­ets, we could actu­al­ly use their time machines to vis­it our ancient past, okay? So the thing is is that it still has the same lim­i­ta­tions, I should men­tion, but nev­er­the­less, it is possible.

But for us ter­res­tri­al­ly, the next time that it’s gonna hap­pen here ter­res­tri­al­ly is when we cre­ate a time machine and turn it on.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

That’s fas­ci­nat­ing. That’s mind-bend­ing. Well, the mul­ti­verse the­o­ry in and of itself is a mind-bender.

It’s very excit­ing to hear because these things are possible.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Oh, yeah. We live in a strange uni­verse, but I think it’s stranger than we can even believe to begin.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

That’s the beauty.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

And it’s real, yeah.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

And the foun­da­tions are all in math.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

That’s right, that’s exact­ly right.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Back to fund­ing, build­ing on top of this machine, if fund­ing weren’t a con­straint, what would you com­mis­sion tomorrow?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Well, tomor­row, what I would do is I would find Chan­dra and say, hey, look, we’re gonna be able to get back to work here. And I would say, first thing that we would wan­na do is to show that frame drag­ging is, that would be the very first thing. Because as I said, the fund­ing for that real­ly is some­thing that is not out of bounds.

And it’s the nec­es­sary con­di­tion. We were talk­ing about math­e­mat­ics. That’s the nec­es­sary condition.

We have to show that frame drag­ging is there. Plus it has its own imme­di­ate prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions asso­ci­at­ed with it. So that would be the first thing that we would actu­al­ly fund is just show­ing that frame drag­ging by cir­cu­lat­ing beam of light is real.

Not only the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble, but it’s actu­al­ly prac­ti­cal­ly pos­si­ble. Then we would go from there. Because what you do is you learn at dif­fer­ent steps.

So what we would learn is what is nec­es­sary to do that. The oth­er thing is that every­thing that I’ve done so far has not brought quan­tum mechan­ics direct­ly into it. So I think that quan­tum mechan­ics is going to make, going from the twist­ing of space to the twist­ing of time, a lot eas­i­er than we think that it’s going to be.

Right now, the ener­gy bar­ri­er in going just from twist­ing of space to the twist­ing of time is a huge ener­gy bar­ri­er. And I mean, I have to agree with my sci­en­tif­ic col­leagues who say, you know, the Mal­let’s the­o­ret­i­cal­ly been able to show this, but is it prac­ti­cal to do it? The frame drag­ging part, yeah.

But going from the frame drag­ging to the time twist­ing, it seems like it needs galac­tic amounts of ener­gy to do that. But that’s where quan­tum mechan­ics comes in. It may be that that bar­ri­er is much low­er than we think.

This is what hap­pened with, you know, to the atom­ic ener­gy project. It seemed like it was going to be much hard­er to do than it turned out to do, but that was because of quan­tum mechan­ics. So that’s some­thing that we haven’t even begun to explore yet.

But that would be the first thing we’re look­ing at, is frame drag­ging by light.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Okay, as far as your research and how it has evolved over time, I’m curi­ous to know where your cur­rent research sits.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Okay, that’s a good ques­tion, but now you opened it up in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion because my cur­rent inter­est right now, which hopes that we’ll come back to it, is the fact that you men­tioned my book. By the way, I hope that peo­ple will be inter­est­ed. The book is both a mem­oir and a sci­ence book.

Thank you, Time Trav­el­er, which is avail­able from Ama­zon, by the way. There’s a real pos­si­bil­i­ty that that’s going to be made into a fea­ture film, as you men­tioned. I actu­al­ly have a pro­duc­er that is inter­est­ed in doing this.

It turns out that there’s oth­er pro­duc­ers who are real­ly excit­ed about the book, main­ly because, you know, from a Hol­ly­wood stand­point, they’re inter­est­ed not just in the sci­ence part, but of course, the father-son sto­ry is some­thing that they’re real­ly inter­est­ed in, and what’s dri­ven me, because I’ve had a lot of obsta­cles in my life. Being African-Amer­i­can has been inter­est­ing, to use that gen­er­al phrase, but the thing is is that that is what I’ve been inter­est­ed in cur­rent­ly. Now, from two dif­fer­ent levels.

One, because I would, you know, for me, it’s almost as close as I may get while I’m alive of actu­al­ly see­ing my father alive again, because it would bring him to the big screen, and I would be able to actu­al­ly see this rep­re­sen­ta­tion of him. So for me, that was just, that’s almost the same, okay? That’s one aspect of it, but when things go to a fea­ture film lev­el, that brings an aware­ness to a larg­er audi­ence, you know?

Maybe some­one like an Elon Musk now, you know, says, hey, wait a minute, you know, this guy’s work is based on Ein­stein. Maybe he’s not crazy. Maybe let’s take a look at what he’s doing, you know?

But in any case, it brings it to a larg­er group, and so the fund­ing may come from indi­rect­ly because of that greater expo­sure at that lev­el. So that’s, you might say, one of the things that I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in right now is try­ing to help shep­herd this thing and give encour­age­ment to my pro­duc­er and my agent to have this made into a fea­ture film.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

That would be everything.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Yeah, exact­ly.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

I real­ly hope that this one goes through. I know we need to wrap up. I have a final question.

Sure. Your jour­ney feels both sci­en­tif­ic and deeply human. As my father’s daugh­ter, I can relate to your journey.

And I’m won­der­ing if you could tell sci­en­tists one thing about curios­i­ty, loss, and per­sis­tence, what would it be?

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Well, I would just actu­al­ly quote or para­phrase actu­al­ly what Ein­stein said. And Ein­stein essen­tial­ly said that imag­i­na­tion is more impor­tant than knowl­edge. Knowl­edge is lim­it­ed, but imag­i­na­tion encir­cles the world.

And what he meant by that was not that we don’t need knowl­edge, but it’s actu­al­ly our imag­i­na­tion that gives us the inter­est and the quest to obtain knowl­edge, okay? If we go back even as far as back to what­ev­er these first human beings did when they saw light­ning cre­at­ing fire, their imag­i­na­tion was sparked. And their imag­i­na­tions were what led them to be able to do it themselves.

And it’s our imag­i­na­tion that put us into space. It’s our imag­i­na­tion. I mean, if you look at the peo­ple who were ear­ly sci­en­tists who were inter­est­ed in space trav­el, they were moti­vat­ed by peo­ple like Jules Verne.

So, and a lot of engi­neers and things like that, even in the space pro­gram, Star Trek was what stim­u­lat­ed a lot of them to go into. So, it’s our imag­i­na­tion. As human beings, it’s our imag­i­na­tion which gives us.

So, to me and to young peo­ple, I would say, use your imag­i­na­tion. What­ev­er you imag­ine, what we don’t even think about some­times is even the most ordi­nary lev­el. The place that you live in, that was some­one’s imag­i­na­tion, okay?

And it was cre­at­ed. We lived in a world that was imag­ined. So, you should use your imag­i­na­tion to try to make a dif­fer­ence, a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence in this world.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

That is tremen­dous­ly beau­ti­ful. Thank you so much. That’s real­ly pow­er­ful and motivating.

It’s almost like end­less energy.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Thank you. Well, it’s been a plea­sure for me.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Well, yes, Dr. Mal­lett, thank you very much. I gen­uine­ly appre­ci­ate it and for answer­ing my ques­tions and for writ­ing your phe­nom­e­nal book. Thank you for your time.

It’s gonna be a treat for my lis­ten­ers. It real­ly is.

Dr. Ronald Mallett

Thank you very much.

Gabrielle Bir­chak

Dr. Ronald Mal­let­t’s sto­ry is more than a tale of equa­tions and the­o­ry. It is a tes­ta­ment to the pow­er of human per­se­ver­ance. What began as a child’s wish to see his father again became a life­long pur­suit that bridged the emo­tion­al and the math­e­mat­i­cal, trans­form­ing loss into a legacy.

His work reminds us that sci­ence often begins not with cold cal­cu­la­tion, but with love, long­ing and the courage to imag­ine beyond accept­ed lim­its. Through his deter­mi­na­tion to explore the deep­est struc­ture of space-time, Dr. Mal­lett shows us that curios­i­ty can heal, that imag­i­na­tion can endure, and that even grief can become a force for dis­cov­ery, bend­ing not only time, but the very shape of human pos­si­bil­i­ty. Thank you for lis­ten­ing to Math, Sci­ence, History.

And until next time, carpe diem. Thank you for lis­ten­ing to Math, Sci­ence, His­to­ry. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please leave a rat­ing and a review because those rat­ings and reviews real­ly help the podcast.

If you would like to lis­ten to Math, Sci­ence, His­to­ry with­out the ads on your pod­cast play­er, vis­it us at MathScienceHistory.Supercast.com. There, you can sign up for a tier which will give you ear­ly release pod­casts, research notes, bonus mate­r­i­al, and dis­counts on our mer­chan­dise. Also, you can find the tran­scripts at mathsciencehistory.com under the link called Tran­scrip­to­ri­um. And while you’re there, remem­ber to click on that cof­fee but­ton and make a dona­tion because every sin­gle dol­lar that you donate sup­ports our pro­duc­tion costs and keeps our edu­ca­tion­al web­site free. And until next time, carpe diem.