Do you believe in a deterministic future?

I do, but not in the naïve, clockwork sense – but I do believe in dynamical inevitability.

Sometimes I look back and wonder why my path led me, improbably, into the Nuclear Physics Department at Oxford. Who voluntarily chooses nuclear physics as a doctoral field, with no career plan, no roadmap, nothing but a strange gravitational pull? It felt random at the time, stochastic, noise masquerading as direction. But now I see it differently. The laws of physics had already fixed the boundary conditions. The initial state of my life evolved forward under equations I could not yet read, and every so‑called accident – every detour, every improbable choice, every joy and every pain – was simply the system following its natural solution. All of it leading, with quiet determinism, to the mathematician I was meant to meet in the autumn of my life, precisely when I had finally become ready for him.