Time Traveler is the compelling and very human story of a man whose deep childhood trauma — the loss of his father at a young age — propelled him toward scientific greatness. Suffocating beneath the weight of enormous grief, 10-year-old Ronald Mallett picked up a copy of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and it changed his life forever. From that moment on, he threw himself into a quest to find his own Holy Grail — a means to travel back in time and save his father from an untimely death. Remarkably, the working-class African-American boy from the Bronx stuck with this vision, struggling with poverty and prejudice to become one of America’s first black Ph.D.’s in theoretical physics. Dr. Mallett discovered that circulating laser light could twist not just space (a phenomenon known as frame dragging) but also time, thus creating a time loop through which subatomic particles, information, and perhaps one day even people might travel.
Time Traveler follows Dr. Mallett’s journey of self- and scientific discovery as he describes with simple language and elegant metaphors the physics that makes time travel possible. From Einstein’s seminal work in relativity, to closed loops in time, to the already-proven ability to travel forward in time while moving at great speeds, to black holes and lasers and the birth of the universe. Dr. Mallett lays out his theories and presents the reader with what is an actual blueprint for a time machine. An experimental machine to travel back in time is currently being designed at a university laboratory using Dr. Mallett’s theories and equations.