HISTORY OF PHYSICS: EINSTEIN AGAINST PHYSICAL REVIEW JOURNAL
ScienceWeek http://scienceweek.com
The following points are made by Daniel Kennefick (Physics Today
2005 September):

1) Albert Einstein had two careers as a professional physicist,
the first spent through 1933 entirely at German-speaking
universities in central Europe, the second at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1933 until his
death in 1955. During the first period he generally published in
German physics journals, most famously the Annalen der Physik,
where all five of his celebrated papers of 1905 appeared.

2) After relocating to the US, Einstein began to publish
frequently in North American journals. Of those, the Physical
Review, then under the editorship of John Tate, was rapidly
assuming the mantle of the world's premier journal of physics.[1]
Einstein first published there in 1931 on the first of three
winter visits to Caltech. With Nathan Rosen, his first American
assistant, Einstein published two more papers in the Physical
Review: the famous 1935 paper by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and
Rosen (EPR) and a 1936 paper that introduced the concept of the
Einstein-Rosen bridge, nowadays better known as a wormhole. But
except for a letter to the journal's editor he wrote in 1952 --
in response to a paper critical of his unified field theory work
-- that 1936 paper was the last Einstein would ever publish
there.

3) Einstein stopped submitting work to the Physical Review after
receiving a negative critique from the journal in response to a
paper he had written with Rosen on gravitational waves later in
1936.[2] That much has long been known, at least to the editors
of Einstein's collected papers. But the story of Einstein's
subsequent interaction with the referee in that case is not well
known to physicists outside of the gravitational-wave community.
Last March, the journal's current editor-in-chief, Martin Blume,
and his colleagues uncovered the journal's logbook records from
the era, a find that has confirmed the suspicions about that
referee's identity.[3] Moreover, the story raises the possibility
that Einstein's gravitational-wave paper with Rosen may have been
his only genuine encounter with anonymous peer review. Einstein,
who reacted angrily to the referee report, would have been well
advised to pay more attention to its criticisms, which proved to
be valid.

4) Einstein introduced gravitational waves into his theory of
general relativity in 1916, within a few months of finding the
correct form of the field equations for it. Although the concept
of gravitational radiation was then relatively new and no
experimental evidence existed to support it, the analogy with the
case of the electromagnetic field was so compelling that by the
1930s most scientists thought that gravitational waves must exist
in principle. Nevertheless, in 1936 Einstein wrote to his friend
Max Born:

"Together with a young collaborator, I arrived at the interesting
result that gravitational waves do not exist, though they had
been assumed a certainty to the first approximation. This shows
that the non-linear general relativistic field equations can tell
us more or, rather, limit us more than we have believed up to
now."[4]

Einstein submitted this research to the Physical Review under the
title "Do Gravitational Waves Exist?" with Rosen as coauthor.
Although the original version of the paper no longer exists,
Einstein's answer to the title question, to judge from his letter
to Born, was "No". It is remarkable that at this stage in his
career Einstein was prepared to believe that gravitational waves
did not exist, but he also managed to convince his new assistant,
Leopold Infeld, who replaced Rosen in 1936, that his argument was
valid.[5]

References (abridged):

1. A. Pais, in The Physical Review: The First Hundred Years, H.
H. Stoke, ed., AIP Press, New York (1995), p. 1

2. A. Pais, "Subtle is the Lord": The Science and Life of Albert
Einstein, Oxford U. Press, New York (1982), p. 494

3. D. Kennefick, in The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity,
H. Goenner, J. Renn, J. Ritter, T. Sauer, eds., Birkh"user-
Verlag, Boston (1999), p. 207

4. A. Einstein, The Born-Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics,
and Physics in Uncertain Times, MacMillan, New York (2005), p.
122

5. L. Infeld, Quest: An Autobiography, Chelsea, New York (1980)

Physics Today http://www.physicstoday.org

--------------------------------

Related Material:

ON GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

The following points are made by B.C. Barish and R. Weiss
(Physics Today October 1999):

1) The idea of gravitational waves was already implicit in the
1905 special theory of relativity, with its finite limiting speed
for information transfer. The explicit formulation for
gravitational waves in general relativity was put forward by
Einstein in 1916 and 1918. He showed that the acceleration of
masses generates time-dependent gravitational fields that
propagate away from their source at the speed of light as
warpages of spacetime. Such a propagating warpage is called a
"gravitational wave".

2) The best empirical evidence we have of the existence of
gravitational radiation is indirect. It comes from the 1974
discovery and beautiful observations, by Russell Hulse and Joseph
Taylor, of the first binary pulsar ever found. Exploiting the
clockwork pulsar signal from the neutron star, they were able to
monitor the orbital period of the binary star system with
exquisite precision and confirm that it was indeed gradually
speeding up at just the rate predicted for the general-
relativistic emission of gravitational waves.

3) The direct detection of gravitational waves will mark the
opening of a new window on the near and far reaches of the
Cosmos. For physics, its most important promise is the direct
observation of gravitation in highly relativistic settings, so
that one can test general relativity in the strong-field limit,
where it is not merely a small correction to Newtonian gravity.
In that limit, the strong curvature of the spacetime geometry
should show us fundamentally new physics.

Physics Today http://www.physicstoday.org

--------------------------------

Related Material:

ASTROPHYSICS: ON GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

The following points are made by Peter S. Shawhan (American
Scientist 2004 92:350):

1) To understand how gravitational radiation arises requires at
least a rudimentary understanding of Einstein's general theory of
relativity. This theory posits that time is a dimension similar
to the three dimensions of space and that the combined four-
dimensional "spacetime" can be treated using the language of
geometry.

2) The complete history of an object's position as a function of
time is described by a "world line", which threads through the
four-dimensional coordinate system, from past to present to
future. If no force acts on the object, it will move with a
constant velocity, and its world line will be a straight line at
some fixed angle relative to the coordinate axes.

3) An object near a large mass feels the force of gravity
accelerate it, so that its world line follows a curved path
relative to the coordinate system. For example, if a ball is
thrown straight up into the air, a graph of its height versus
time traces out a parabola. At least, that is the conventional
view, dating back to Isacce Newton (1642-1727). Albert Einstein
(1879-1955) took the bold step of casting that notion aside and
postulating that a massive body curves the coordinate system
itself. Rather than following a curved path in a Cartesian
coordinate system, the ball actually follows a "straight" path (a
geodesic) in a curved coordinate system, returning to the
thrower's hand at a later time because the geodesic leads it
there. Gravity, therefore, is not really a force but is a
manifestation of curvature in the geometry of spacetime.

4) The difference between these two points of view may sound like
a matter of definition, but Einstein's theory made a few specific
predictions that have since been experimentally verified. For
example, the British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-
1944) took advantage of a 1919 solar eclipse to measure the
deflection of starlight passing near the Sun, finding it to be in
agreement with theory. His result was trumpeted on the front
pages of newspapers around the world, instantly establishing
Einstein's popular reputation.

5) General relativity says that the geometrical curvature induced
by a massive object does not arise everywhere instantaneously.
Rather, it travels outward from its source at the speed of light.
Thus, if a massive object alters its shape or orientation, or if
a collection of objects changes its spatial arrangement, the
gravitational effect -- the curvature of spacetime -- propagates
away as a gravitational wave.

6) A gravitational wave may be described as a time-varying
distortion of the geometry of space, temporarily altering the
effective distance between any given pair of points. If the
causative shift in mass is abrupt, the wave will take the form of
a short pulse, much like the ripple produced after dropping a
rock into a still pond. In the case of a periodic change, the
wave will be sustained, much like the carrier wave for a
broadcast radio signal. In either case, the amplitude of the wave
will be inversely proportional to the distance from the source.
Unlike ordinary gravitational acceleration, which always points
toward the source, a gravitational wave acts perpendicularly to
the direction in which it is traveling, and thus is called a
transverse wave. In this sense it is like light, rather than like
sound, which propagates as longitudinal waves.(1-5)

References (abridged):

1. Barish, B. C., and R. Weiss. 1999. LIGO and the detection of
gravitational waves. Physics Today 52(10):44-50

2. Lyne, A. G., M. Burgay, M. Kramer, A. Possenti, R. N.
Manchester, F. Camilo, M. A. McLaughlin, D. R. Lorimer, N.
D'Amico, B. C. Joshi, J. Reynolds and P. C. C. Freire. 2004. A
double-pulsar system: A rare laboratory for relativistic gravity
and plasma physics. Science 303:1153-1157

3. Saulson, P. R. 1994. Fundamentals of Interferometric
Gravitational Wave Detectors. Singapore: World Scientific.
Schutz, B. S. 2003. Gravity from the Ground Up. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press

4. Taylor, J. H., and J. M. Weisberg. 1982. A new test of general
relativity: Gravitational radiation and the binary pulsar PSR
1913+16. Astrophysical Journal 253:908-920

5. Will, C. M. 1993. Was Einstein Right? Putting General
Relativity to the Test. New York: Basic Books

American Scientist http://www.americanscientist.org

ScienceWeek http://scienceweek.com

HISTORY OF PHYSICS: EINSTEIN AGAINST PHYSICAL REVIEW JOURNAL
ScienceWeek http://scienceweek.com
The following points are made by Daniel Kennefick (Physics Today
2005 September):

1) Albert Einstein had two careers as a professional physicist,
the first spent through 1933 entirely at German-speaking
universities in central Europe, the second at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1933 until his
death in 1955. During the first period he generally published in
German physics journals, most famously the Annalen der Physik,
where all five of his celebrated papers of 1905 appeared.

2) After relocating to the US, Einstein began to publish
frequently in North American journals. Of those, the Physical
Review, then under the editorship of John Tate, was rapidly
assuming the mantle of the world's premier journal of physics.[1]
Einstein first published there in 1931 on the first of three
winter visits to Caltech. With Nathan Rosen, his first American
assistant, Einstein published two more papers in the Physical
Review: the famous 1935 paper by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and
Rosen (EPR) and a 1936 paper that introduced the concept of the
Einstein-Rosen bridge, nowadays better known as a wormhole. But
except for a letter to the journal's editor he wrote in 1952 --
in response to a paper critical of his unified field theory work
-- that 1936 paper was the last Einstein would ever publish
there.

3) Einstein stopped submitting work to the Physical Review after
receiving a negative critique from the journal in response to a
paper he had written with Rosen on gravitational waves later in
1936.[2] That much has long been known, at least to the editors
of Einstein's collected papers. But the story of Einstein's
subsequent interaction with the referee in that case is not well
known to physicists outside of the gravitational-wave community.
Last March, the journal's current editor-in-chief, Martin Blume,
and his colleagues uncovered the journal's logbook records from
the era, a find that has confirmed the suspicions about that
referee's identity.[3] Moreover, the story raises the possibility
that Einstein's gravitational-wave paper with Rosen may have been
his only genuine encounter with anonymous peer review. Einstein,
who reacted angrily to the referee report, would have been well
advised to pay more attention to its criticisms, which proved to
be valid.

4) Einstein introduced gravitational waves into his theory of
general relativity in 1916, within a few months of finding the
correct form of the field equations for it. Although the concept
of gravitational radiation was then relatively new and no
experimental evidence existed to support it, the analogy with the
case of the electromagnetic field was so compelling that by the
1930s most scientists thought that gravitational waves must exist
in principle. Nevertheless, in 1936 Einstein wrote to his friend
Max Born:

"Together with a young collaborator, I arrived at the interesting
result that gravitational waves do not exist, though they had
been assumed a certainty to the first approximation. This shows
that the non-linear general relativistic field equations can tell
us more or, rather, limit us more than we have believed up to
now."[4]

Einstein submitted this research to the Physical Review under the
title "Do Gravitational Waves Exist?" with Rosen as coauthor.
Although the original version of the paper no longer exists,
Einstein's answer to the title question, to judge from his letter
to Born, was "No". It is remarkable that at this stage in his
career Einstein was prepared to believe that gravitational waves
did not exist, but he also managed to convince his new assistant,
Leopold Infeld, who replaced Rosen in 1936, that his argument was
valid.[5]

References (abridged):

1. A. Pais, in The Physical Review: The First Hundred Years, H.
H. Stoke, ed., AIP Press, New York (1995), p. 1

2. A. Pais, "Subtle is the Lord": The Science and Life of Albert
Einstein, Oxford U. Press, New York (1982), p. 494

3. D. Kennefick, in The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity,
H. Goenner, J. Renn, J. Ritter, T. Sauer, eds., Birkh"user-
Verlag, Boston (1999), p. 207

4. A. Einstein, The Born-Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics,
and Physics in Uncertain Times, MacMillan, New York (2005), p.
122

5. L. Infeld, Quest: An Autobiography, Chelsea, New York (1980)

Physics Today http://www.physicstoday.org

--------------------------------

Related Material:

ON GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

The following points are made by B.C. Barish and R. Weiss
(Physics Today October 1999):

1) The idea of gravitational waves was already implicit in the
1905 special theory of relativity, with its finite limiting speed
for information transfer. The explicit formulation for
gravitational waves in general relativity was put forward by
Einstein in 1916 and 1918. He showed that the acceleration of
masses generates time-dependent gravitational fields that
propagate away from their source at the speed of light as
warpages of spacetime. Such a propagating warpage is called a
"gravitational wave".

2) The best empirical evidence we have of the existence of
gravitational radiation is indirect. It comes from the 1974
discovery and beautiful observations, by Russell Hulse and Joseph
Taylor, of the first binary pulsar ever found. Exploiting the
clockwork pulsar signal from the neutron star, they were able to
monitor the orbital period of the binary star system with
exquisite precision and confirm that it was indeed gradually
speeding up at just the rate predicted for the general-
relativistic emission of gravitational waves.

3) The direct detection of gravitational waves will mark the
opening of a new window on the near and far reaches of the
Cosmos. For physics, its most important promise is the direct
observation of gravitation in highly relativistic settings, so
that one can test general relativity in the strong-field limit,
where it is not merely a small correction to Newtonian gravity.
In that limit, the strong curvature of the spacetime geometry
should show us fundamentally new physics.

Physics Today http://www.physicstoday.org

--------------------------------

Related Material:

ASTROPHYSICS: ON GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

The following points are made by Peter S. Shawhan (American
Scientist 2004 92:350):

1) To understand how gravitational radiation arises requires at
least a rudimentary understanding of Einstein's general theory of
relativity. This theory posits that time is a dimension similar
to the three dimensions of space and that the combined four-
dimensional "spacetime" can be treated using the language of
geometry.

2) The complete history of an object's position as a function of
time is described by a "world line", which threads through the
four-dimensional coordinate system, from past to present to
future. If no force acts on the object, it will move with a
constant velocity, and its world line will be a straight line at
some fixed angle relative to the coordinate axes.

3) An object near a large mass feels the force of gravity
accelerate it, so that its world line follows a curved path
relative to the coordinate system. For example, if a ball is
thrown straight up into the air, a graph of its height versus
time traces out a parabola. At least, that is the conventional
view, dating back to Isacce Newton (1642-1727). Albert Einstein
(1879-1955) took the bold step of casting that notion aside and
postulating that a massive body curves the coordinate system
itself. Rather than following a curved path in a Cartesian
coordinate system, the ball actually follows a "straight" path (a
geodesic) in a curved coordinate system, returning to the
thrower's hand at a later time because the geodesic leads it
there. Gravity, therefore, is not really a force but is a
manifestation of curvature in the geometry of spacetime.

4) The difference between these two points of view may sound like
a matter of definition, but Einstein's theory made a few specific
predictions that have since been experimentally verified. For
example, the British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-
1944) took advantage of a 1919 solar eclipse to measure the
deflection of starlight passing near the Sun, finding it to be in
agreement with theory. His result was trumpeted on the front
pages of newspapers around the world, instantly establishing
Einstein's popular reputation.

5) General relativity says that the geometrical curvature induced
by a massive object does not arise everywhere instantaneously.
Rather, it travels outward from its source at the speed of light.
Thus, if a massive object alters its shape or orientation, or if
a collection of objects changes its spatial arrangement, the
gravitational effect -- the curvature of spacetime -- propagates
away as a gravitational wave.

6) A gravitational wave may be described as a time-varying
distortion of the geometry of space, temporarily altering the
effective distance between any given pair of points. If the
causative shift in mass is abrupt, the wave will take the form of
a short pulse, much like the ripple produced after dropping a
rock into a still pond. In the case of a periodic change, the
wave will be sustained, much like the carrier wave for a
broadcast radio signal. In either case, the amplitude of the wave
will be inversely proportional to the distance from the source.
Unlike ordinary gravitational acceleration, which always points
toward the source, a gravitational wave acts perpendicularly to
the direction in which it is traveling, and thus is called a
transverse wave. In this sense it is like light, rather than like
sound, which propagates as longitudinal waves.(1-5)

References (abridged):

1. Barish, B. C., and R. Weiss. 1999. LIGO and the detection of
gravitational waves. Physics Today 52(10):44-50

2. Lyne, A. G., M. Burgay, M. Kramer, A. Possenti, R. N.
Manchester, F. Camilo, M. A. McLaughlin, D. R. Lorimer, N.
D'Amico, B. C. Joshi, J. Reynolds and P. C. C. Freire. 2004. A
double-pulsar system: A rare laboratory for relativistic gravity
and plasma physics. Science 303:1153-1157

3. Saulson, P. R. 1994. Fundamentals of Interferometric
Gravitational Wave Detectors. Singapore: World Scientific.
Schutz, B. S. 2003. Gravity from the Ground Up. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press

4. Taylor, J. H., and J. M. Weisberg. 1982. A new test of general
relativity: Gravitational radiation and the binary pulsar PSR
1913+16. Astrophysical Journal 253:908-920

5. Will, C. M. 1993. Was Einstein Right? Putting General
Relativity to the Test. New York: Basic Books

American Scientist http://www.americanscientist.org

ScienceWeek http://scienceweek.com