Alan Dershowitz and Joe Lieberman, who claim to have intellectual credentials, might have done well to remember some basic principles of Einsteinian physics and later theories of chaos and non-linearity . Their evolutions progress independently of each other. After the conjunction occurs, however, reversing time would mean coordinating actions that were previously independent. The idea makes sense only if events which happened a certain way occur a second time in reverse order. . . . Because branching points are theoretically possible at every instant, the probability that any given worldline will be recreated becomes infinitesimal very quickly. . . .
Time moves only forward .
And Hayles goes on to give excellent examples of the irreversibility of time. A throw of the I Ching sticks, for example, will produce, by chance, specific numerical rules to be followed step by step. But, as in knot theory, once the work produced by these rules is in place, you can't undo it. Artists have been making this point since early in the century. Marcel Duchamp's term infrathin , for example, refers to the impossibility of repetition, no two instances of any given phenomenon being identical.