Ronald Mallett thinks he has cracked time travel. The secret, he says, is in twisting the fabric of space-time with a ring of rotating lasers to make a loop of time that would allow you to travel backwards. It will take a lot more explaining and experiments, but after a half century of work, the 77-year-old astrophysicist has got that down pat.
His claim is not as ridiculous as it may seem. Entire academic departments are dedicated to studying the possibility of time travel. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on a “time-reversal machine” to detect dark matter. There are still lots of physicists who believe travelling to the past is impossible, but it is not the sci-fi pipe dream it once was.
But the story of how Prof Mallett, now emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, reached this point could have been lifted from a comic
