I am watching the TV series Devs, and they use quantum computers to look back in time at what probably happened. It isn’t very believable…. especially when they dial in to a particular person, at a particular time.
Such a system won’t have a search engine that uses things like names and dates (because it isn’t text) as we are used to with Google. But it might be able to match precise images or precise sounds, like Google’s reverse image search or Shazam.
Often in popular culture magic uses incantations, and often they need to be spoken just right.
What if an incantation is a way to search all of history, and if it matches precisely with all of the previous times those sounds were made, it accesses the power they had? Makes more rational sense than the words themselves having power on their own…