"In June 1936, Einstein and Rosen sent the paper... "Do Gravitational Waves Exist?" to The Physical Review... [which] rejected the paper, provoking Einstein's furious reaction. Einstein told the editor he... saw no reason to address the erroneous comments of his anonymous expert [Howard Percy Robertson] and... preferred to publish the paper elsewhere. ...Leopold Infeld arrived in Princeton to replace Rosen as... assistant. Einstein explained to him his proof of the non-existence of gravity waves. ...Infeld told Robertson [then professor of theoretical physics at Princeton] about Einstein's... paper[.] Robertson... found a trivial mistake [by] Infeld [and] clarified... the mistake in Einstein's explanation... The linearized approximation [led] to plane transverse gravitational waves... introduc[ing]... coordinate singularities... not real singularities. ...Robertson ...suggested ...the so-called Einstein-Rosen metric... be transformed... to cylindrical coordinates. ...the singularity can be regarded as describing a material source. The solution describe[s]...cylindrical... rather than plane gravitational waves. ...with Robertson's help (still not knowing it was Robertson who had [refereed] The Physical Review) ...Einstein ...revis[ed the] ...paper and added a section: "Rigorous Solution for Cylindrical Waves"... The new version of the paper was re-titled "On Gravitational Waves"..."
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Mathematicians from the United StatesCosmologistsPhysicists from the United StatesPrinceton University facultyPeople from Washington (state)
Original Language: English
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Galina Weinstein, "Einstein and Gravitational Waves 1936-1938," (Feb. 16, 2016) arXiv:1602.04674 [physics.hist-ph], a summary of Section 1, Ch. 3 of General Relativity Conflict and Rivalries: Einstein's Polemics with Physicists (2016). Ref: "On Gravitational Waves," Journal of the Franklin Institute (1937) 223, pp. 43-54.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_P._Robertson
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Howard P. Robertson
Howard Percy Robertson (January 27, 1903 – August 26, 1961) was an American mathematician and physicist known for contributions related to physical cosmology and the uncertainty principle. He was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University.
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