Physics Professor Builds Time Machine to Save Dead Father

If you think this sounds like the premise of a sci-fi movie, you’re not alone. Time travel is a topic that has been addressed ad nauseum in fiction, but it’s never come even close to being reality. Until now – or so says University of Connecticut physics professor Ronald Mallett, who intends to travel not to the future, but the past: specifically, the Bronx in 1955.

Dr. Ronald L. Mallett has kept his time-travel work secret for decades, fearing that public knowledge of the project would be career suicide. For more than 50 years, Mallett has obsessed over finding a way to traverse spatiotemporal continuum so he could warn his father to stop his two-pack-a-day habit and take better care of himself, in the hopes of preventing his fatal heart attack at 33.

The Boston Phoenix profiled Dr. Mallett’s attempts at building a contraption based on the one he saw on the cover of the Classics Illustrated version of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, detailing his work and revealing that his theory, though in need of more work, is sound. Spike Lee is currently writing a screenplay for a movie, which he’ll also direct, based on Mallett’s book, Time Traveler.

Sort of bizarre? Sure, but it’s also fascinating. Check out the whole story over at The Boston Phoenix.