Classically, it’s a glorified game of cat’s cradle:
Here, the strings are knotted closely, like fingers, or there, long-range, like the spider’s path
Meanwhile beads of likely energies hover over the imaginary threads, clouds upon clouds
Upon clouds of charge and potential–

There are more technical terms to describe this: summations of internal energy,
Particle mesh Ewald, Gibbs, Helmholtz, and Maxwell,
Ideal airs and vapours, much like Delphi:

So this is the great calculus of all matter and material flow!
Held and derived in instants, otherwise averaged, integrated, over space and time.
Basically we are asking
Why are these men and women happy to push their rocks up the hill?
What makes them move? Shorthand:
Why did God—
The answer is as I once read in a textbook:
“The energy of the Universe is constant;
the entropy is tending to a maximum.”