Going back to an old thread, I recently came   
across this lament that physicist's don't know   
their own history and an argument about why it matters:  
  
>Not long ago I had the opportunity to give a   
>colloquium on these and related matters at a   
>major university. Among the 50 or so physicists   
>in the audience, not one had read Einstein's   
>original papers, yet alone Poincare's. As I   
>said, physicists are notorious for taking   
>history on faith. Such insouciance, though, has   
>not stopped physicists from repeating for   
>several generations the usual platitudes about   
>the history of their field. One might make a   
>case that science is inherently   
>anhistorical--certainly recent editions of   
>undergraduate physics texts are entirely bereft   
>of meaningful history. But if the history of   
>science has any relevance to the doing of it,   
>surely it is to remind us that science is a   
>collective enterprise and to engender in us a   
>humble awareness that the landscape of science   
>would appear very different had the vast unrecognized   
>majority never existed.  
  
"Lost in Einstein's Shadow:  Einstein gets the   
glory, but others were paving the way"  
by Tony Rothman  
  
American Scientist Online  
Volume: 94 Number: 2 Page: 112  
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/2006.2.112  
www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/49611  
  
  
Kevin D. Hoover