Another story that broke too late to make April 1st?

Only this one has the backing of the University of
Connecticut

*Physics professor confident
his time machine will work*

A physics professor says he is building a time machine that will transport things to the future or the past.
Ronald Mallett says his machine could transport anything from an atom to a person.

The University of Connecticut professor hopes to have a working model and start experiments this autumn.
He told the Boston Globe he's basing his work on Einstein's theory of relativity.

He says the project is serious and added: "I'm not a nut."
He told the paper: "I would think I was a crackpot, too, if there weren't other colleagues I knew who were working on it. This isn't Ron Mallett's theory of matter - it's Einstein's theory of relativity. I'm not pulling things out of the known laws of physics."
The professor and his colleagues plan to build a machine to test whether it's possible to transport a subatomic particle through time using a ring of light.
He hopes the energy from a rotating laser beam may warp the space inside the ring of the light so gravity forces the neutron to rotate sideways. With more energy, he thinks it's possible a second neutron would appear. This second particle would be the first one visiting itself from the future.

He admits sending a human through time may need more energy than scientists know how to harness currently, but he sees it as just ''an engineering problem.''

Prof Mallett's boss, William Stwalley, chairman of the university's physics department, said: "His ideas certainly have merit. I think some of his ideas are very interesting and they would make nice tests of general relativity."

Story filed: 16:02 Friday 5th April 2002