The author argues in favor of personalized historico-scientific reconstructions of important events in the past from the perspective of today’s science. It is important in this case for a historian of science to explain his own scientific position clearly and openly, even if the latter deviates from accepted views. To illustrate the thesis, an interpretation is developed of a famous 1911 article by the Ehrenfests on the «Conceptual Foundations of the Statistical Approach in Mechanics.» Two important aspects of their analysis have stimulated much productive research by subsequent generations of physicists aimed at solving the irreversibility problem on the basis of Gibbs’ mixing and on trying to prove the ergodic hypothesis. Even though, in the author’s opinion, one can conclude from the perspective of today’s science that the Ehrenfests’ interpretations of these two problems were fundamentally flawed, heuristically they helped to develop modern ideas of synergetics and fractal theory.