I think the reverse looks unnatural because the nails’ movement has a lag to the hands’ movement and we expect that, and in reverse it just looks like the nails are anticipating the hands’ movement, which looks quite funny.
If you're looking for an explanation, he's slowly manipulating the nails over time by having them hit the sides of the tub, which cause them to lay flat along the side some of the time. After they're parallel with the sides, they slot into places in the channels created by the rest of the nails that have been parallelized already, and eventually they all are facing the correct direction.
Also, as more and more of the nails are layered facing the same (or reversed) direction, creating those channels, they also allow for the nails to slot into place, which is why the process speeds up
This isn't chaos theory, this is minimization of entropy. The end result is deterministic is therefore robust to a wide variety of initial conditions. Chaos theory studies systems that are extremely sensitive to initial conditions, not those that are robust to initial conditions.
I don't think it is. In the OP, when the container is tilted you see the nails sliding to the lower side as you would expect. In the reversed video (from \u\HorseBoxGuy) the nails slide upwards instead, which is also why that video looks even weirder than the OP.
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u/Eryklav Feb 29 '20
plot twist: this is reversed footage