Even warrants were of limited substantive importance. Rather, developing a theory of option and warrant pricing was a way of elaborating the randomwalk model of stock prices: a form of "normal science" in Kuhn's (1970) terms. As Cootner put it, "options obtain their value from the price of the underlying shares" (1964, p. 373). If one had a well-defined mathematical model of the fluctuations of stock prices (and, the issues discussed in chapter 4 aside, the log-normal random walk seemed to offer such a model), then it appeared as if all one had to do was some relatively easy mathematical analysis to reach a formula for the expected value of a warrant or option.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 532