irreversibility

irreversibility

English

Etymology

irreversible +‎ -ity

Noun

irreversibility (usually uncountable, plural irreversibilities)

1. The quality of being irreversible; the lack of an ability to be reversed.
   • 1806, Samuel Barnard, The Essence, Spirituality, and Glorious Issue, of the Religion of Christ Jesus, to All God's Chosen, W. Nicholson, page 279,

     Now if the irreversibility of God's gifts to his people, be considered, what joy for those who feel within a wicked heart.

   • 1911, Power, Hill Pub. Co., page 171,

     But because of irreversibilities in the engine, all of this theoretical conversion is not realized and some internal energy remains in the steam exhausting from the engine.

   • 2007, Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh University Press, →ISBN, page 103,

     Paul Horwich, for example, in Asymmetries in Time, includes the laws of thermodynamics in a list of ten temporally asymmetric phenomena which operate in our conceptual system. Seen in this way, where the irreversibility of time is inseparable from rationality itself, the argument against backwards time tends to be expressed in terms of consequences, or the fear that time reversal is paramount to irrationality.