Fortuna
History is written by the victors goes the old trope. Removed from most history are the elements of chance and randomness. We like to believe things are the way they are because they were inevitable. You have to go all the way back to the Romans to find an appreciation of fortune and fate, call it luck and chance, as determinative elements in the affairs of humanity.
In Rome, Fortuna was a goddess, her shrine in many homes. Her blessings thought tied to virtue, now there's a notion completely lost to contemporary life. As Imperial Rome crumbled, the North African, Augustine scrubbed Fortuna from the pantheon—upon this thought a church was built. “Then let him alone be worshiped; because Fortune is not able to resist him when he commands her, and sends her where he pleases,” writes the Bishop of Hippo. Life was determined, indeed predetermined.
Reintroduction of randomness took two-thousand years, extraordinarily with the study of the universe's most fundamental elements, quanta. Some, Einstein for example, went to their death beds in opposition to this reintroduction claiming god, “He does not play dice.” Unlike Augustine, Einstein was ignorant of fortune as a goddess, though both agreed determinism was the one male god.
Reintroduced in quantum physics, indeterminism failed recognition in any other aspect of modern life, except maybe in the last decades virulent sprouting of casinos across the American landscape. Nonetheless, a little indeterminism would prove quite helpful in meeting many of our present predicaments, particularly in regards to the development of technology.
Accepted history is nowhere more useless than with the history of technology, all deemed determinedly inevitable. In a 1958 speech at the Princeton Theological Seminary, quantum physicist and atomic bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer begged to differ,
“I believe it is a very accidental thing too, and again I would say it must be studied by historians and not by logicians, as to what effect if any developments in science have on human life. I mean that not primarily in the terms of the mechanical differences, although here too, it seems to me, there have been some mighty odd accidents. Things could have been done with scientific knowledge, which lay fallow for a long time because they didn't have any great sex appeal for the economy or the industry of the time, and things get done in a great hurry like making atomic bombs almost before you knew how, because they do have a great sex appeal. A good deal could be written about the randomness and the lack of logic in relation to what we learn how to do and in fact what we do do.”