Looper: Ronald Mallett on Bending Time

On October 17, 2012, Professor Ronald L. Mallett joined Jack Hitt onstage at the Institute Library in New Haven, Connecticut, as part of the ongoing series “Amateur Hour,” in which various tinkerers, zealots, and collectors discuss their obsessions. Mallett is Research Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut, where he has been developing a theory for time travel. He is the author of Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality. The conversation that follows was recorded live and has been edited for brevity and meaning.

Jack Hitt: There are two essential ways one can be an amateur: One is to be kept outside of a fortress of expertise, usually by an elitism masked as credentials, and the other is to wander past the boundary of acceptable knowledge, where there are no credentialed anybodies. At best, one is a pioneer. And I think that you qualify in the latter category.

In preparation for this, Ron, I started digging up movies that involve time travel. Midnight in Paris, Austin Powers, GalaxyQuest, Star Trek, especially part four; It’s a Wonderful Life, Bill & Ted, Dr. Who, Harry Potter, the Terminator movies, Groundhog Day, and so many others.

My favorite is The Time Machine, the 1960 version, which was the closest to the way H. G. Wells wrote the book. They actually try to explain the notion of a fourth dimension. A lot of people may not realize it, but Wells wrote the book ten years before Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. In fact, Wells was the first one to mention time as a fourth dimension, which is the foundation of the scientific notion of time.

So is The Time Machine the best or your favorite?

It’s the best and my favorite. A really close second for me is Time Cop—a really under-rated movie, but it’s superb. Jean-Claude Van Damme! People thought it would be just a fight movie, but it plays with the notion of time travel in a very clever way. It involves an agency that has the job of enforcing the time continuum—that is to say, these are police that actually find out if something is going to go wrong, and they go out and try to correct it.

Is there some aspect in particular that makes it a favorite?

The ethics of time travel. If you can go back in time, there’s an ethical issue. It can be used for good or bad. Once time travel into the past actually becomes a reality—and it will become reality—we’ll have the responsibility of making sure that it’s used in the right way. And just as we have other regulatory agencies, we will eventually have a regulatory agency that addresses the question of how this technology is used. But first we have to realize that we cannot not use the technology.

It seems like time travel involves a lot of discussion about how we manage it, or how we run it. I can’t think of any other potential invention [End Page 12] that got this kind of prediscovery ethical treatment. After the atomic bomb, or the internet, the reaction was, “It’s done. We can’t get it back in the bottle.” Why do you think time travel gets this treatment?

Ronald Mallett. Coventry, CT, February 2014. (christina paige)

I think it’s because of the nature of time travel, what it means to us. The whole notion is in some way a primordial issue. If we go back through history, people at one time or another have asked: What if I could do something to change the past? What if I could’ve taken another path? What if I could see that loved one again? This is an ancient feeling that touches something deep in us about the longing for things past and the quest to try and understand the things to come. So even before technology was able to engage the notion of time travel, we already had an emotional connection with the possibility...