time-reverse

English

Verb

time-reverse (third-person singular simple present time-reverses, present participle time-reversing, simple past and past participle time-reversed)

1. (transitive, philosophy, physics) To subject something to a transformation in which the passage of time and all of its velocities are theorized to be reversed.
   • 1977, Lawrence Sklar, Space, Time, and Spacetime, page 401:

     It is compatible with the time-reversal noninvariance of the laws that the universe be such that the universe that consists of just its states at a time in reverse temporal order, without even time-reversing the states themselves, is a possible physical universe.

   • 2017, Farhad Rachidi, Marcos Rubinstein, Mario Paolone (editors), Electromagnetic Time Reversal - Application to EMC and Power Systems:

     The records of the waveforms are then transmitted to a central server that time-reverses them and lets the time-reversed versions back-propagate into the location domain by numerical simulation.

   • 2020, Martin Gardner, Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements, page 134:

     Time-reverse all motions and the three will return at the same instant to the starting point.

Derived terms

• time reversal