The Growing Impact of Old Scientific Papers
At least for me, the title was a bit confusing. It's not the "History of Science" as a subject of study in and of itself or a specific academic field, but rather the large corpus of existing results and publications that's having an effect.<p>I find this distinction very important, because it helps separate the immediate process of science--the people, the historical quirks--from the actual results. It's not a perfect division, of course, but I think it's pretty good in most scientific fields and also very important. It helps distance science, the cumulative understanding of our world, from the people who produced it who are, after all, just human. In my view, this is the main goal of the scientific process, so it's just another component of what makes science <i>science</i>.<p>This is also not to say that the history of science is not interesting or worth studying on its own, merely that it is something largely distinct from the underlying science itself and should ideally be kept that way.