Mallett was born to an African American family in Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania, on March 30, 1945, and grew up in The Bronx in New York City.

During its first season, Mallett watched the episode The City on the Edge of Forever that "involved both the theme of time travel and lost love", and this became his favorite of the entire series.

[5] His research interests include black holes, general relativity, quantum cosmology, relativistic astrophysics and time travel.

Mallett's plans for a time machine are based upon a ring laser's properties in the context of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Mallett first argued that the ring laser would produce a limited amount of frame-dragging which might be measured experimentally, saying:[9]"In Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, both matter and energy can create a gravitational field.

My current research considers both the weak and strong gravitational fields produced by a single continuously circulating unidirectional beam of light.

In June 2008, motion picture director Spike Lee's production company announced it had acquired the film rights to Mallett's book.

[13] In 2006, Mallett declared that the possibility of time travel using a method based on a circulating light beam could be verified within the following decade.

"[19] However, he does not provide any additional argument as to why we should expect to see closed timelike curves in a different spacetime where there is no line source, and where the light is caused to circulate due to passing through a physical substance like a photonic crystal rather than circulating in vacuum due to the curved spacetime around the line source.

"[22] Finally, Olum and Everett note a theorem proven by Stephen Hawking in a 1992 paper on the Chronology Protection Conjecture,[23] which demonstrated that according to General Relativity it should be impossible to create closed timelike curves in any finite region that satisfies the weak energy condition, meaning that the region contains no exotic matter with negative energy.