“A superficial reading of history often appears to offer a causal deterministic explanation for why things happened one way and not another. But a more refined analysis tends to reveal an intricate web of competing forces at crossroads that, together with a great number of accidents, render the road taken far from obvious and certainly not inevitable, forcing one into a description of how, not why.”
―
Thomas Hertog,
On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory