If you think traveling back in time is only in the movies, you have to think again. American theoretical physicist, academic and author Dr. Ronald Mallett is fulfilling a longtime promise for his deceased father -- and this has something to do with time travel.

TechRadar explained that this wild idea dawned on 10-year-old Mallett when his father, Boyd, died of a heart attack in 1955. The incident prompted Mallett to promise his dad that he will find a way back to the future to warn the latter of the cause of his death.

This mission was also reportedly inspired by H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" which Mallett was able to grab a copy a year after his father passed away at the age of 33.

"For me the sun rose and set on him," said Mallet in the TechRadar report noting that he spent years of research to arrive at great results though he kept them secret at first.

At 69 years old, Mallett is now a physics professor at the University of Connecticut but fears that he may not be able to really see his father again like what he planned.

"But he has an equation that he believes holds the key to building the first time machine and he might be close to a breakthrough," added TechRadar.

In a similar report, News Discovery said that even though Mallett has given up on the possibility of physical time travel, he is still positive that the machine he will be able to build  "can receive messages from our descendants -- children who aren't born yet."

This is expected to be really useful to future generations who can utilize the machine to communicate with earlier generations.

"By using a circulating beam of laser light, I have been able to mathematically show that this can lead to a twisting of space and time," Mallett explained in the News Discovery report noting that a neutron stream can transmit the binary code back to the past.

It is estimated that the building of the machine would cost around $250,000 and that messages could not be sent before it is made.

In addition, Huffington Post noted that for his time travel experiment done in 1971, Mallet used two atomic clocks -- one was kept at the Naval Observatory while the other made a trip around the world "at the speed of sound."

"When the two clocks were compared at the end of the flight, it was found that the clock that had been on the passenger jet had actually slowed down compared to the clock at rest. This means that the plane and passengers had flown fractions of a second to the future. The effect depends on speed," added the same report.