Temporal Symmetry Analysis: A Framework for Testing Structural Reachability of Proposed Futures

This paper introduces Temporal Symmetry Analysis (TSA), a formal framework for testing whether a proposed future state is structurally reachable from the present. Unlike probabilistic forecasting methods, TSA produces categorical verdicts about the temporal consistency of trajectories. The framework operates through a round trip: projecting forward from the present to a proposed future, then reasoning backward from that future to derive the set of preconditions that must hold at each prior time point, then comparing these derived requirements against the actual present state. The paper formalizes direction-aware alignment scoring, a combined symmetry measure, four verdict categories, urgency-ranked gap analysis, corridor analysis for multiple futures, temporal signal detection, and asymmetry decomposition into five actionable categories.