When Tom Mahood began as a grad student at Cal State Fullerton, he recalls being led to a generous professor with a dry and quirky sense of humor. Mahood, a retired civil engineer living in Irvine, said he was – and still is – interested in weird and unusual research. 'People sent me to Woodward.' James Woodward, 71, has been thinking about how to rapidly travel through space and time for much of his life. Woodward, a physicist and science historian, taught at Cal State Fullerton from 1972 until 2005. The now-retired emeritus professor can still be found conducting experiments in his lab on the sixth floor of McCarthy Hall. 'They’ve tolerated my idiosyncratic interest in trying to quickly get stuff around the galaxy for years and years,' Woodward said. Woodward said his research suggests that it is possible to create 'wormholes' – hypothetical tunnels created by distortions of space and time that would allow rapid travel between two distant points in the universe. 'If I had a wormhole generator here in the lab and you wanted to visit your cousin on Mars, I could punch in a bunch of stuff, flip a switch, and a hole would open up,' he said. 'I know,' he said. 'It’s really unbelievable.' Of course, there are other considerations when traveling to Mars. 'The atmospheric pressure is different on Mars. If you opened a wormhole between here and the surface of Mars, you’d have to hang on for dear life.' Fans of 'Star Trek,' 'Doctor Who' or 'Stargate' might be familiar with the concept of traveling through space and time. Only Woodward’s research isn’t based in science fiction. It’s based on Mach’s principle, which works within Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, according to Woodward. 'Let me explain what we’re doing,' he said. Physicists take for granted that if you push against something it pushes back. That’s inertia, one of Newton’s laws of motion. But how does inertia happen? Mach’s principle says inertia on an object on Earth is caused by the gravitational action of all the matter in the universe, Woodward said. To put it simply, the universe is pushing back. This opens the possibility of creating negative mass, which is what you would need to create a wormhole, he said. It also opens the possibility for time travel. 'Serious scientists say 'We need to invent a quantum theory of gravity to be able to do it,'' Woodward said. 'That may not be the case,' he said. 'If this stuff actually works, it might be possible to make wormholes sometime in the next 10 or 20 years, not thousands or millions of years from now.' Mahood, who worked in the lab with Woodward for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, said Woodward’s research can be mathematically proven. 'If you know the calculus, it comes out right.' Mahood, who has a master’s degree in physics, helped Woodward build some of the test machines in the lab. 'We did a lot of purchasing at Home Depot,' he said. Mahood’s website has an explainer for non-physicists, titled: 'Mach’s Principle, Inertia and Fruitcakes for the Hopelessly Befuddled (No stinkin’ Physics degree required).' For more detailed reading, Woodward has laid it all out in his recently published 279-page book, 'Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes.' 'As a historian of science knows, if you’re doing anything offbeat, people ignore you,' Woodward said. 'If you want to get people to pay attention to you, you have to write a book,' he said. When the publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, asked him to write a formal book proposal, he figured he’d be dismissed. 'I figured the stakeholders would blow me off because I’m going to write a book on how to make absurdly benign wormholes,' he said. The phrase 'absurdly benign wormholes' was introduced by California Institute of Technology physicist Kip Thorne in his first paper on wormhole physics in 1988. In theory, absurdly benign wormholes would be safer to travel. 'My generation thinks that’s nuts,' he said. 'It turns out not all generations think it’s nuts.' The way Woodward thinks of his critics: 'Either it’s right or it’s wrong. Whether it’s right or wrong doesn’t depend on me or my critics or my supporters or anything else. It depends on what the facts of reality are,' he said. He began writing the book in the summer of 2011 and it was published in December, 2012, with no ghost writer. He wrote it himself. In the first six weeks, it sold 277 copies, he said. Woodward is donating all of the royalties to charity and the Space Studies Institute in Mojave to fund research in advanced propulsion. 'I’m not selling anything. I’m not even selling the book.' Woodward is driven by the possibility that he’s right. When he was a grad student, one of his professors gave him some advice that stuck with him: If you want to be the world’s expert in anything, all you have to do is work at it long enough, the professor told him. There may be somebody much smarter than you, who, if they put their mind to it, could do it in six months or a year, but most smart people won’t do that until somebody shows them that it’s worth the effort. Before anyone speeds along in a wormhole, scientists are likely to figure out how to travel through space in an advanced propulsion starship. 'I’d love to see a starship or a wormhole generator built within in my lifetime,' said Heidi Fearn, a physics professor at Cal State Fullerton, who has been advancing Woodward’s research. 'I’m not sure the wormhole will be built,' she said. But a rocket booster that gets to space without expelling a propellant is doable, she said. 'You don’t need waste material that you’re going to burn off and kick out the tailpipe,' she said. Woodward and Fearn experiment with inertia and gravity for advanced propulsion and wormhole travel using electromechanical piezoelectric devices made of lead zirconium titanate crystals, which have properties suitable for experimentation. The devices create a thrust, a force that propels an object forward. 'We’re looking for a very small effect which we hope to be able to make larger,' Woodward said. With his book finished, Woodward is finding more time to enjoy himself. He was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer and has had other health battles since retiring in 2005. Clinical trial drug treatments, along with other drug treatments, appear to have prolonged his life. 'It cleared the lung cancer in a few months, and there is still no sign of recurrence,' Woodward said. 'I am fabulously lucky, truly a medical outlier among outliers,' he said. He relaxes more now, spending time with his partner of 28 years, Carole Harrison, and his cats. 'Now that the book is written, the way I figure it is my bit part in the play is pretty much over,' he said. 'I’m shuffling off stage at this point.'