Ronald Mallett

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Ronald Mallett bigraphy, stories - American theoretical physicist

Ronald Mallett : biography

March 3, 1945 –

Ronald Lawrence "Ron" Mallett (born March 30, 1945) is an American theoretical physicist, academic, and author. He has taught physics at the University of Connecticut since 1975. He is best known for his scientific position on the possibility of time travel.

Personal life

Mallett is a member of both the American Physical Society and the National Society of Black Physicists; his brother is artist Keith Mallett.

Career

In 1975, Mallett was appointed a job as Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, where he continues to work today. His research interests include general relativity, quantum gravity, and time travel.

In 1980, Mallett was promoted to Associate Professor, and since 1987, he has been a full Professor. He has received two grants and many other distinctions.

In 2007, Mallett’s life story of pursuing a time machine was told on This American Life, episode #324.

Time travel research

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 within the context of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Mallett first argued that the ring laser would produce a limited amount of frame-dragging which might be measured experimentally, saying:R. L. Mallett, "Weak gravitational field of the electromagnetic radiation in a ring laser", . pdf "In Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, both matter and energy can create a gravitational field. This means that the energy of a light beam can produce a gravitational field. My current research considers both the weak and strong gravitational fields produced by a single continuously circulating unidirectional beam of light. In the weak gravitational field of an unidirectional ring laser, it is predicted that a spinning neutral particle, when placed in the ring, is dragged around by the resulting gravitational field." 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:R. L. Mallett, "The gravitational field of a circulating light beam", . pdf

For the strong gravitational field of a circulating cylinder of light, I have found new exact solutions of the Einstein field equations for the exterior and interior gravitational fields of the light cylinder. The exterior gravitational field is shown to contain closed timelike lines.The presence of closed timelike lines indicates the possibility of time travel into the past. This creates the foundation for a time machine based on a circulating cylinder of light. 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 Professor’s UConn web page, and an illustration showing the concept on which Mallett has designed the time machine can be seen .

Mallett also wrote a book entitled, Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, co-written with New York Times best-selling author Bruce B. 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 within the 21st century and possibly within less than a decade. Mallett uses Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to attempt to substantiate his claims.http://www.physorg.com/news63371210.html

Criticism

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.