A very insidious problem has been at play for decades at the University level, that has blured many issues in fundamental physics. It is the tendency to hyperspecialize and compartmentalize the various disciplines.
The end result is that most modern reference works have been written by great experts of each sub-specialty, who often have only superficial notions of some of the other sub-specialities of their own field.
Over time, as sub-specialties kept being separated, reorganized and eliminated, important information eventually completely ceased to be referred to in reference works written subsequently, and have thus completely disappeared from the collective consciousness of the physical community, even though they are still available in the humongous mountain of past writings.
For example: Abraham and Kaufmann's important conclusions regarding the distinction that must be made between longitudinal inertia and transverse inertia, that seems to allow calculation of the correct angle of deflection of the trajectories of photons by gravitational attraction in the frame of classical mechanics.
Another example is De Broglie's important conclusion regarding the possible internal structure of photons, which, in conjunction with Abraham and Kaufmann's discovery, seem to be the very key to building the last missing causality link between the quantities of motion that accumulate by means of electromagnetic acceleration of particles and the energy that quarks up and down are made up of.
This state of hyperspecialization of each physicist has caused recent experimental observations, the likes of which used to throw physics circles into frenzied effervescence at the beginning of the 20th century, and sent every physicist of the time into an unbridled race to discovery, to be taken on today with a level of interest akin to apathy, each physicist being under the impression that colleagues, "experts" in this new field, will take charge somewhere, and that they will eventually be informed of the answer, none of them feeling particularly competent to deal with the problem.
We have had a very telling example of this problem over the course of the past 10 years in the case of the acceleration deemed "anomalous" of far spacecrafts Pioneer 10 and 11, and for which the equations of General Relativity are unable to calculate the observed hyperbolic trajectories, contrary to all expectations for a theory that supposedly is the final word on all observed gravitational phenomena!
