Achi news desk-
Last Updated: March 25, 2024, 11:00 IST
The Professor’s source of inspiration is his late father.
The man’s interest in time travel stems from a traumatic childhood experience.
The idea of time travel has long fascinated people. A number of books and films have been written or directed around this idea. According to Earth.com, one such book called The Time Machine written by HG Wells sparked an interest in 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 interest in time travel and his equation stems from a traumatic childhood experience. When the Professor was only ten years old, his father, a television repairman who nurtured his son’s love for science, died tragically of a heart attack. Young Mallett was damaged to the core and sought solace in books.
Wells’ opening lines became the mantra of the Professor’s life: “Scientific people know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. And why can’t we move in Time as we move around the other dimensions of Space?” This profound question fueled Mallett’s scientific journey and he devoted 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 around the center 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 exchanged for huge amounts of energy (E), as defined by the classical equation E = mc^2.
Mallett’s blueprint for a time machine focuses on what he calls an “intense and continuous rotating beam of light” to manipulate gravity. His device would use a ring of lasers to mimic the spacetime warping effects of a black hole.
