[ogurechny]

It's only a curiosity if you believe in stereotypical and enormously simplified model of “history” as “progress”, some machine-like movement that has a goal. If you exclude this from your model, no wonder that it is seen as some kind of malfunction, something that shouldn't happen.

In other words, status quo, the world we have around us now, is retroactively set as a meaningful target for everything that has happened before.

A lot of people who are not at all as notable as Newton should be able to look back at their histories, and see how many random turns have happened, how many random things they've read set the direction of their thoughts, and so on.