I'm currently re-reading Time Traveler: a Scientist's Personal Mission To Make Time Travel a Reality by Ronald L. Mallett. Mallet's book reads like good, suspenseful and humorous fiction that is also excellent nonfiction when he describes his life's journey and his obsession that propelled him to try to achieve the near impossible feat of time travel. As I was reading, I felt as if I was sharing a very long and engaging lunch with a fun, down to earth and articulate professor who was relating a spellbinding, remarkable, true personal and scientific tale in terms that made it easy to understand his awesome vision.
June 20, 2007

"...And finally to see someone inspired by this book to actually make it a reality -- Read Time Traveller by U Conn's Dr. Ronald Mallett who's father's early death at the age of 33 inspired Mallett to try and make Wells' story actually come true.

In this way, Mallett's book may be the best homage to Wells because time travel has its intrinsic appeal in our desire to revisit and thereby regain that which perhaps is otherwise irrevocably lost".

"...I know I'm not alone in finding that Death is a powerful thing to wrap one's mind around, and something which can drive one in unexpected directions in life. Just consider Ronald Mallett, whose memoir Time Traveler was also done as a fantastically-gripping radio piece on This American Life. Here's a kid who loses his father (a TV repairman) at age 10, and spends the rest of his life trying to build a time machine a la H.G. Wells -- and does, in a fashion, after becoming a professional physicist along the way. I was riveted while listening to that radio piece, when I connected with the same yearning, and the same sense that there was a way to deal with the issue that was not based on religious faith, but on actually looking around and engaging with the physical world...

"I was absolutely intrigued, and really moved, by a recent broadcast of This American Life that told the story of the physicist Ron Mallett, and how the death of his father and reading this comic book changed his life. The whole show is good, but if you want to hear just the part about his life, it starts at around 34 minutes in. It is so fascinating, you really should listen to it".