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The idea of time travel has fascinated people for a long time now. Numerous books and films have been written or directed around this idea. According to Earth.com, one such book named The Time Machine written by HG Wells sparked interest about time travel in the mind of an astrophysicist professor named Ron Mallet. He embarked on a seemingly unbelievable quest to achieve this objective. Now, he finally claims to have made an equation for the same. Professor Mallett’s fascination with time travel and its equation has its origins in a traumatising childhood experience. When the Professor was just ten years old, his father, a television repairman who fostered his son’s love of science, tragically passed away from a heart attack. A young Mallett was devastated to the core and sought solace in books.
Wells’s opening lines became the Professor’s life mantra: “Scientific people know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?” This profound question ignited Mallett’s scientific journey and he dedicated himself to understanding the nature of time, determined to find a way to revisit the past and see his beloved father once more.
The Professor made decades of research into black holes and Einstein’s theories of relativity his basis for devising the time travel equation. A black hole is a huge circular area in space where the gravity surrounding the centre is so powerful that it pulls everything into it, even light. The theory of relativity is an explanation of how speed affects mass, time, and space. The theory includes a solution for the speed of light to define the relationship between energy and matter. It means that small amounts of mass (m) can be interchangeable with enormous amounts of energy (E), as defined by the classic equation E = mc^2.
Mallett’s blueprint for a time machine centres on what he terms “an intense and continuous rotating beam of light” to manipulate gravity. His device would make use of a ring of lasers to mimic the spacetime-distorting effects of a black hole.
