Given the three-phase history, it is hard to sustain the view that the second phase of the empirical history of option pricing, the close fit between the model and empirical patterns of market prices from the mid 1970s to the summer of 1987, was simply the discovery by market participants of the correct way to price options. It is more plausible to see the third phase, the emergence of the skew, as rational learning from the near-catastrophe of October 1987 (the huge price movements of October 19 can be seen as an emphatic rejection of the null hypothesis of log-normality), but even here there are difficulties.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1163