Billiard balls do not scatter in a "haphazard way". They move in an entirely predictably way, IF you could precisely define the exact properties of ALL of the environment. Factors like ball curvatures and three axis stiffnesses at the points of contact, ball spacings, table friction and stiffness, path direction and ball spin, etc. all effect the paths, making the final result appear to be "haphazard". Knowing all of these properties, would make it possible to calculate the paths backward to reestablish the original shape. It would not make TIME go backward, it would just make a calculation of the ball position "go backward".
Yeah, that was my take too. Just reverse the physics and you’ll end up in the same state as you started.
...that said, I could easily be missing the point :)
That was a discussion I had with an engineer friend of mine decades ago. I posited to him that there was no such thing as ‘random’. If we knew and could calculate all of the variables, we would be able to determine the outcome of every encounter. Our current state of technology is not there, yet.
I agree. And that is what they probably did but with imperfect knowledge of the state of their system.
“Knowing all of these properties, would make it possible to calculate the paths backward to reestablish the original shape.”
Ah, but there is the rub. If the billiard balls are quantum particles, then you cannot know all of those properties, due to the uncertainty principle. So you cannot use the standard method of just calculating the reverse of the operations that were done to them to restore them to their original state.
Spoil sport!
“IF you could precisely define the exact properties of ALL of the environment”
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle disallows this.