Terrance McKenna developed an interest in the Chinese I-Ching tiles and discovered what he thought was a calendar system within the King Wen sequence. When he examined the first order of difference in the sequences, he found a system that produced time intervals that seemed important.

Cycles within cycles... reminiscent of the Mayan calendar isn't it?

McKenna designed a computer program based on his findings, and the program produces a graph of the first order differences. He called this the Time Wave, and believed it represents the amount of Novelty in the world at any time point on the graph. Novelty can be likened to the product of creativity, and its opposite could be described as habit.

Here is a screen shot from McKenna's Program showing the results for the period from 1989 to 2012. The software is still available from this site.

Here is a site which shows the results of the time wave graphically over several different time spans.

The remarkable thing about this graph is that it is fractal in nature in that the shape of the graph remains the same whether the time span is millenia or decades. McKenna is thought to have calibrated the time frame by assigning historical events to places on the graph which had the greatest rate of change (steepest slope). Starting first from a time span of millions of years, and then from shorter spans of centuries and decades, he arrived at the end point of December 2012 without any other knowledge relating to that date.

While McKenna and the TimeWave theory was never accepted by the scientific community, it is none the less very interesting. Here is McKenna discussing the Time Wave (video)