[rsfern]

I think it’s just that the time/frequency analogy is so strongly rooted in signals processing applications

In the physics and crystallography literature the Fourier transform is framed in terms of real space and reciprocal space, which personally I think is much more natural in the context of computing a structure factor or diffraction pattern for example. Many measurements (like diffraction) most directly measure reciprocal space, and one applies the inverse Fourier transform to recover the real space information of interest.

Sometimes I think instead of time and frequency it would be more clear to frame signal processing applications in terms of time and reciprocal time just to highlight the symmetry and make it more clear that there’s nothing special about time and frequency vs some other dimension