 The CFT is named after the chemist Gavin E. Crooks (then at University of California) who discovered it in 1998.The most general statement of the CFT relates the probability of a space-time trajectory formula_1 to the time-reversal of the trajectory formula_2.The theorem says if the dynamics of the system satisfies microscopic reversibility, then the forward time trajectory is exponentially more likely than the reverse, given that it produces entropy,

If one defines a generic reaction coordinate of the system as a function of the Cartesian coordinates of the constituent particles (" e.g.