Some of the pleasure of the film is experiencing the twists as they are revealed, but we learn earlier than I expected that the story centers around technology to invert the flow of time and/or entropy.
entropy
Science Reader Question: Time and Forgiveness
Effects follow causes; we must live in the future with all the intended and unintended results of our choices. We call this sequence of unrepeatable moments time. In other words, time is that feature of the universe which makes forgiveness necessary.
Science Corner: Dancing in the Sunshine
The second law of thermodynamics gets trotted out all the time, especially in conversations about evolutionary biology. Less familiar are principles of maximum entropy production, which deal specifically with systems that are not in equilibrium (everything the same temperature). Most of the situations we experience involve differences in temperature, but there’s still a lot to learn about […]