A common ability that you see in science fiction and fantasy is the ability to manipulate time. Marvel characters like Doctor Strange and Magik can rewind or reverse time. This ability is also seen in the Prince of Persia games. Orhime from the anime series Bleach can reverse damage and heal people and things via reversing time. Creating temporal loops is a very useful magical skill to have. It is especially useful in spells designed to reverse damage and restore the integrity of things and objects.

Temporal Loops

Real magical spells to manipulate temporal histories are based on loops. A loop is a finite sequence that has a position that starts and ends at the same place. We experience loops daily. If you were to look at a clock, you will see that you have numbers arranged 1-12. 0 and 12 are in the same position. This implies that the clock starts at 0:00 and ends at12:00 in the same position. When the clock moves from 12 through a sequence of hours and ends at 12, you repeat. 24 hours is the sum of two loops around the clock. If we start at 10:00 AM and go through a sequence of 24 hours, we would have 10+24=34. 34Mod24 and 10mod24 are congruent to 10. This can be modeled as [10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, ,5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,12, 1, 2, 3, 4, ,5 ,6, 7, 8, 9]. After 12, the sequence repeats. The value around which the sequence wraps around and repeats is called a mod. The amount of times things repeat in a loop is the frequency and the interval of that loop is a period. These frequencies and periods have waveforms. A collection of these waveforms are the harmonics, so temporal histories have a harmonic nature. Having periods and frequencies does not necessarily imply that the entities at the corresponding coordinates are redundant.

The entities (the events, objects, and people) and their interactions among 10:00 AM today, 10:00 AM yesterday, and 10:00 AM a hundred years ago are different, so while the temporal coordinate is not unique, what happens at those times is. There are different possible ways things can play out and different things that can exist where these differences create different possible states and different configurations. These different possible states refer to entropy. So, while time has a periodic nature where it is comprised of a series of redundant loops, the states at those times are not necessarily redundant.

Creating Temporal Loops

Redundancy and entropy correspond respectively to order and disorder albeit when things become completely uniform in their redundancy, it is practically disordered. These sentences can convey information because they are not random and there is order. There is not an equally likely probability of one character appearing in a sequence over another, so the sequence of characters, ideas, and words are not random. There is an order to the characters which implies that they are redundant correlations. However, abnryu has the same information content as hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. By creating a loop of temporal histories, you are creating redundancies where configurations repeat. By doing this, you are increasing order, decreasing disorder, and manipulating the information that corresponds to histories. Any psychic or magical technique that revolves around manipulating temporal histories orders the statistical properties of the corresponding configurations. Chaotic and random systems are ideal systems to practice on. Random and chaotic systems have a high amount of uncertainty. Most systems that humans intuitively think are random are chaotic in that they are deterministic. Practical applications of psychic and magical techniques happen within the context of deterministic systems since deterministic systems are the most relevant to everyday life, so whether something is truly random is not relevant. Chaotic systems generate entropy via increasing the uncertainty of a system at least exponentially.