NP article re: cause & effect, patterns of history

[Doug Millison]

And yet one cannot help but conclude that if the car had not taken a wrong
turn or if the monkey had not bitten the King of Greece, then the subsequent
turn of events would have been very different. As Mark Buchanan says, "If
the smallest of details continually intrude on the larger picture, with the
power to alter it radically, how is the historian to make sense of anything?
According to Buchanan, an answer to this problem may be found in physics. In
his recent book, Ubiquity, he argues that recent discoveries in the field of
non-equilibrium physics are beginning to make it possible to see why history
is the way it is; why it is - and even must be - punctuated by dramatic,
unpredictable upheavals; and to see why all past efforts to perceive cycles,
progressions and understandable patterns of change in history have
necessarily been doomed to failure. The origins of his extraordinary claim
are to be found in the work of three physicists - Per Bak, Chao Tang and
Kurt Weisenfeld. [...]" 
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/current/sciphi15.htm