Ron Mallett is an astrophysicist who has spent his adult life believing that time travel is possible. According to him, with the help of scientific equations and principles, a time machine could be built. Mallett is a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut. He investigates black holes and general relativities, theories of space, time and gravity. He also theorizes about time travel, with the dream of building a time machine that would let him see his father again. CNN has the details:
It all hinges, says Mallett, on Einstein's special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity.
"To put it in a nutshell, Einstein said that time can be affected by speed," says Mallett.
Mallett gives the example of astronauts traversing space in a rocket that's traveling close to the speed of light. Time would pass differently on Earth than it would for the people in the rocket.
"They could actually come back finding out that they're only a few years older, but decades have passed here on Earth," he says.
Mallett points to the 1968 sci-fi classic movie "Planet of the Apes," at the end of which [spoiler alert] an astronaut realizes that he hasn't traveled to a distant, ape-ruled planet, but merely returned to Earth in a post-apocalyptic future in which mankind has been subjugated by simians.
"That is an accurate representation of Einstein's special theory of relativity," says Mallet. "So the upshot is that, according to the special theory of relativity, if you're traveling fast enough, you respectively are traveling through time. And effectively, that would be a representation of time travel."
image via CNN