The "ball rolling to the top of the sphere" requires infinite time. "Some arbitrary time" is an expression of a finite time.
You cannot simple mix ideas of finite and infinite and have the result make sense, as anyone who has stayed at the Hilbert Hotel knows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand...
The next step would be to verify that the paths always stay on the surface. The mathematics shown says the point always follows the surface, but I don't see a demonstration that that's true.
I no longer have the skills to easily do this calculation.
No it doesn't, because it's not a sphere. The dome is specifically designed so that it takes finite time. There's zero involvement of infinity, or mixing infinity, here.
Can you explain why?
The skit at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPzR_D9qKeo gives some examples. The one at https://youtu.be/xPzR_D9qKeo?t=165 is pretty close to this example "if it's in physics, it's invertable."
That doesn't mean that if it's invertable it's in physics.
Are the inverse dynamics of this system still in Newtonian physics? For example, is is the inverse path actually on the described surface or does it detach? How does a moving mass have an instantaneous jerk with no change in velocity?
This is a red herring. It sounds plausible, but there is no trajectory that does this. This is the weakest paragraph in the original post, and I am not sure whether this is intentional (because the demonstration sounds truthy if you don’t go too deep in the details) or whether it was not entirely thought out. There is some discussion about the time-reversal thing here: https://blog.gruffdavies.com/2017/12/24/newtonian-physics-is... . There isn’t much to discuss however, because ultimately it is just a distraction.
What this does not change, however, is that the dome does not demonstrate non-determinism. The apparent demonstration hinges on logical errors that remain errors regardless of the framework used, be it classical or quantum mechanics, or relativity.
Yes, that is exactly right. Not only in any direction, but beginning at any time.
The easiest way to see this is described at the end: imagine the ball is initially in motion and the initial conditions are precisely those that bring it precisely to rest at the apex of the dome at some time T. (Making this possible is the reason the dome has to be a specific shape. Not all shapes allow this.) The time-reversal of this motion is the ball beginning to move in some arbitrary direction at some arbitrary time.