When Ronald Mallett was 11 his father died and he took in very badly. Over the next few years he began truanting from school, and looked to be going nowhere in life. But then he read some sci-fi stories about time travel, and realised that if he could build a time machine then he could go back and prevent his father's death.
The time traveller is his story. We hear of how he started to study assiduously, and got a job in the air force, where he could continue his studies, and which also paid for his university tuition afterwards.
Mallett would pore over the works of Einstein and other great physicists, with little understanding of it at first, but as his studies continued he began to be able to follow more and more of it. We hear of how he climbed his way up the academic ladder, always looking to work in areas related to time travel, but keeping his ultimate ambition a secret. By 2002 however, he was ready to announce his ideas to a physics conference, and he has also been working on experiments to test them out. I don't know whether he'll succeed in building a time machine, but it's a fascinating story of how keeping hold of an early ambition lead to Mallett's academic success.
home
