A few comments come to mind in response to Daniel Kennefick’s beautiful piece of scholarship on Einstein and peer review (Physics Today, September 2005, page 43).
At the end of the 1936 Einstein-Rosen paper as it was finally published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, there is the following note:
The second part of this paper was considerably altered by me after the departure of Mr. Rosen for Russia since we had originally interpreted our formula results erroneously. I wish to thank my colleague Professor Robertson for his friendly assistance in the clarification of the original error. I thank also Mr. Hoffmann for kind assistance in translation. A. Einstein
Dan Kennefick clearly knows this; he had sent me a copy of the article. By present American Physical Society ethical standards (see http://www.aps.org/statements/02_2.cfm), Howard Percy Robertson would have been entitled to coauthorship, since he had made a substantial contribution to the interpretation of the paper as it finally appeared. Of course, standards of the time were quite different from those we have today.
It is worth quoting the version of this story that appeared in Abraham Pais’s admirable scientific biography, 1 which Kennefick also cites (his reference 2). In his notes on Einstein’s collaborators, Pais includes the following about Nathan Rosen:
In the course of working on this last problem [cylindrical gravitational waves] Einstein believed for some time that he had shown that the rigorous relativistic field equations do not allow for the existence of gravitational waves. After he found the mistake in the argument, the final manuscript was prepared and sent to the Physical Review [emphasis mine]. It was returned to him accompanied by a lengthy referee report in which clarifications were requested. Einstein was enraged and wrote to the editor that he objected to his paper being shown to colleagues prior to publication. The editor courteously replied that refereeing was a procedure generally applied to all papers submitted to his journal, adding that he regretted that Einstein may not have been aware of this custom. Einstein sent the paper to the Journal of the Franklin Institute and, apart from one brief note of rebuttal, never published in the Physical Review again.
This account clearly contradicts Kennefick’s article on the timing and the details of the discovery of the error, and it contradicts Einstein’s own note at the end of the 1936 paper. Of course, Rosen was in Russia while this was happening. It is likely that Robertson never revealed to Einstein his role as the referee, or Einstein might not have continued to boycott the Physical Review. And although he did not publish in that journal again, he did send several articles to Reviews of Modern Physics—under the same editor, John T. Tate—which also published, in 1949, an entire issue dedicated to Einstein on his 70th birthday.
