Ronald Mallett

At 79 years old, Ronald Mallett physical status not available right now. We will update Ronald Mallett's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

In 1975, Mallett was appointed a job as assistant professor at the University of Connecticut. He was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1987 and has received multiple academic honors and distinctions. His research interests include black holes, general relativity, quantum cosmology, relativistic astrophysics and time travel. As of 2018, he is a Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Connecticut.

In 2007, Mallett's life story of pursuing a time machine was told on This American Life, Episode #324, Act 2.

For quite some time, Ronald Mallett has been working on plans for a time machine. This technology would be based upon a ring laser's properties in the context of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Mallett first argued that the ring laser would produce a limited amount of frame-dragging which might be measured experimentally, saying:

In a later paper, Mallett argued that at sufficient energies, the circulating laser might produce not just frame-dragging but also closed timelike curves (CTC), allowing time travel into the past:

Funding for his program, now known as the Space-time Twisting by Light (STL) project, is progressing. Full details on the project, Mallett's theories, a list of upcoming public lectures and links to popular articles on his work can be found at the Mallett's faculty web page, and an illustration showing the concept on which Mallett has designed the time machine can be seen here.

Mallett also wrote a book entitled, Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, co-written with author Bruce Henderson, that was first published in 2006. In June 2008, motion picture director Spike Lee's production company announced it had acquired the film rights to Mallett's book. Lee is co-writing the movie script and directing the picture.

In 2006, Mallett declared that time travel into the past would be possible in the 21st century and possibly within a decade. Mallett used general relativity to attempt to substantiate his claims.

He created a prototype illustrating how lasers could be used to create a circulating beam of light that twists space and time, and has an equation which he claimed supports his theory.

In a paper by Ken Olum and Allen Everett, the authors claimed to have found problems with Mallett's analysis. One of their objections is that the spacetime which Mallett used in his analysis contains a singularity even when the power to the laser is off and is not the spacetime that would be expected to arise naturally if the circulating laser were activated in previously empty space. Mallett has not offered a published response to Olum and Everett, but in his book Time Traveler, he mentions that he was unable to directly model the optical fiber or photonic crystal which bends the light's path as it travels through it, so the light circulates around rather than moving in a straight line; as a substitute, he chose to include a "line source" (a type of one-dimensional singularity) which would act as a "geometric constraint", bending spacetime in such a way that the light would circulate around on a helix-shaped path in a vacuum (for an older solution involving an infinite cylinder which creates CTCs, in this case due to the cylinder's own rotation rather than light circulating around it, see the Tipler cylinder). He notes that closed timelike curves are present in a spacetime containing both the line source and the circulating light, while they are not present in a spacetime containing only the line source, so that "the closed loops in time had been produced by the circulating flow of light, and not by the non-moving line source." However, he does not provide any additional argument as to why we should expect to see closed timelike curves in a different spacetime where there is no line source, and where the light is caused to circulate due to passing through a physical substance like a photonic crystal rather than circulating in a vacuum due to the curved spacetime around the line source.

Another objection by Olum and Everett is that even if Mallett's choice of spacetime were correct, the energy required to twist spacetime sufficiently would be huge, and that with lasers of the type in use today the ring would have to be much larger in circumference than the observable universe. At one point, Mallett agreed that in a vacuum, the energy requirements would be impractical but noted that the energy required goes down as the speed of light goes down. He then argued that if the light is slowed down significantly by passing it through a medium (as in the experiments of Lene Hau where light was passed through a superfluid and slowed to about 17 metres per second), the needed energy would be attainable. However, the physicist J. Richard Gott argues that slowing down light by passing it through a medium cannot be treated as equivalent to lowering the constant c (the speed of light in a vacuum) in the equations of General Relativity, saying:

Later, Mallett abandoned the idea of using slowed light to reduce the energy, writing that, "For a time, I considered the possibility that slowing down light might increase the gravitational frame dragging effect of the ring laser ... Slow light, however, turned out to be helpful for my research."

Finally, Olum and Everett note a theorem proven by Stephen Hawking in a 1992 paper on the Chronology Protection Conjecture, which demonstrated that according to General Relativity it should be impossible to create closed timelike curves in any finite region that satisfies the weak energy condition, meaning that the region contains no exotic matter with negative energy. Mallett's original solution involved a spacetime containing a line source of infinite length, so it did not violate this theorem despite the absence of exotic matter, but Olum and Everett point out that the theorem "would, however, rule out the creation of CTC's in any finite-sized approximation to this spacetime."

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