How to time travell according to - DR. RONALD MALLETT

 DR. RONALD MALLETT: It's gotta be somethinga little bit more sophisticated than a DeLorean, but the possibility of travelling to the futureis real. DR. RONALD MALLETT: [Laughs] You got it. DR. RONALD MALLETT: I had to keep my passionfor time travel a secret for decades because I wanted to build up my credentials as a legitimatephysicist and the thing is is that any legitimate physicist who was talking about it was riskingprofessional suicide to talk about it. It's been a rocky road because you're not gettingthe support that you need because you're not telling people who might help you what itis you're trying to achieve, even those closest to you.

 And I can remember feeling very depressedbecause I felt like I was getting nowhere in trying to understand how to build a timemachine. And there would be times in which I would just sit in a dark room listeningto Simon & Garfunkel pondering whether all of my life had been a waste to do this. Istarted actually getting heart palpitations. I was put on medical leave for about 6 months.This condition..um..which I was being treated for was the thing that led to my breakthroughbecause for the very first time in my career I was totally isolated. That is to say I didn'thave anything to do except think about all of the information I had been processing fordecades about the various possibilities. DR. RONALD MALLETT: Time travel is now enteringinto the domain of the legitimate. That is to say that the present generation of physicistswho grew up with Star Trek are now the ones who are part of the legitimate community.So it's much more open. Although the way in which it's stated in scientific publications,which is code words like "close time-like loops", which is the same thing as talkingabout time travel to the past. A number of physicists are working on various ideas. Oneof the most well known is the notion of the wormhole.

 A wormhole is just simply...a verysimplified way of thinking about it is that suppose you have a rubber sheet..a flat rubbersheet. And suppose you cut a hole in one side of the sheet and you cut a hole in the otherside of the sheet and you connect those two holes with a tube, that's a wormhole. Thisallows shortcuts through space and time and it turns out that by manipulating a mouthof a wormhole in the appropriate way, its possible for a space traveller to travel througha wormhole and come back and see themselves travelling back into the wormhole in the past.So a wormhole is a possibility. The other possibility are what are known as cosmic strings.These cosmic strings are long lines of matter that are..were created. They're sort of likefault lines in the universe that were created after the universe was created. And these..ifthese fault lines are passing eachother, these these cosmic strings are passing eachother,they can create a loop in time and along that loop in time and along that loop in time youcan go back into the past. So this is another mechanism.

 And then there's my work, whichI found a different way. It turns out that in Einstein's theory, not only can mattercreate gravity, but light can create gravity as well. If gravity can affect time and lightcan create gravity, then light can affect time. And so my idea was to use light to manipulatetime. My time machine would essentially look like a tunnel of light. It would look likea circulating cylinder of light. Think of the coffee in this cup as being a portionof space and think of the spoon as being like a circulating light beam. Imagine, now, thatif I take the spoon and stir the coffee, you can see what' happening to the coffee. That'swhat the circulating light beam is doing to empty space. The circulating light beam iscausing empty space to get swirled around and creating a vortex. But if you stir itstrongly enough, it can actually begin to twist time into a loop because in Einstein'stheory, space and time are linked to each other. Whatever you do to space also eventuallyhappens to time. So in addition to twisting space, you will eventually twist time intoa loop and along that loop in time you can go back into the past and that's the coreof my idea. DR. RONALD MALLETT:

 What I didn't realizewhen I began was the fact that there was gonna be a limitation. For instance if I turnedthe device on today, a loop in time will begin to form. And if I leave it on, for example,let's say 10 years, someone could travel from 10 years back 7 years, 5 years, all the wayback to the beginning where the machine was turned on. But they can't go back earlierthan that because the machine didn't exist earlier than that. That means that time travelto the past is possible, but only from the future after the device is turned on. You'renot gonna be able to travel earlier than that, which answers the question why we haven'tsee time travel tours because that means that the first human scale time machine hasn'tbeen built. But that meant that I was going to be blocked from my possibility of visitingmy father, which was very bittersweet for me. However, I have to say that one of thethings is is that because I've reached the goal theoretically, I feel that that's somethingthat my father would have been very very pleased with, that I have achieved that. And it allowsme, I have to say, to be passionate but its not as all-consuming because I now realizethat in addition to wanting to control time, it's important to want to live in time. Andultimately, for all of us, even though time travel will allow us to have an unprecedentedcontrol of our destiny, we all only have the present moment in our lives and it's importantto live that moment as fully as possible. That's what I have learned.