Imagine if we could send information back to ourselves to warn ourselves of natural disasters, anomalies, earthquakes, the thousands of lives you can save, or even on a more personal level, to try to change our own destiny by sending information back, perhaps to warn loved ones to stay out of situations that might lead to their death. Ronald Mallett, a theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Connecticut, claims to have the solution to time travel. “I actually solved Einstein’s gravitational field equation,” Mallett told The Root. His work has been recognized globally and widely acknowledged by the scientific community. This discovery, and the road to it, has been well documented in numerous interviews, documentaries and Ron’s own book, The Time Traveler. “My solutions to his equations showed that a circulating beam of light will actually cause space and time to become twisted,” says Mallett. “Eventually that twisting of space, if it was great enough, might lead to a twisting of time into a loop that could allow the possibility of time travel or sending information back into the past. And that was my breakthrough.” Mallett is no stranger to making history. As the first black scientist to work at UConn and one of few black physicists in the field during his early years, making a breakthrough in time travel could place him right in line with his idol, Albert Einstein. For him, this work is personal. His motivation behind studying time travel began after the death of his father as a young boy. “I thought if I could go back into the past, I could see him again and maybe prevent what was going to happen,” he says. “So that became my passion.” Mallet sat down with The Root to explain his theory and what it would take to bring time travel to reality in our lifetime in the video above.