Einstein's second-biggest blunder: the mistake in the 1936 gravitational-wave manuscript of Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen (Q2084278)

The starting point of the paper is the well-known story that, in 1936, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen received a critical referee report for a paper which they had submitted to the Physical Review and in which, as as consequence of their calculations, they argued that the general-relativistic gravitational field equations did not allow for plane gravitational waves. In the following year, a modified version of this paper, containing changed consequences drawn from the field equations, was published in [J. Franklin Inst. 223, 43--54 (1937; Zbl 0017.09601; JFM 63.1259.03)]. Based on the referee report, which was published by the historian D. Kennefick in 2007, the author tries ``to reconstruct what the mistake was in the original paper submitted by Einstein and Rosen''. He believes that ``Einstein's and Rosen's central mistake'' has not been clearly worked out before because the referee report was rather loquaciously. Then, and that now in a really loquacious manner, the author tries to extract the mistake from the remarks in the referee report. He comes to the conclusion: ``The original mistake in Einstein-Rosen manuscript turned out to be a bona fide calculational error, and not the result of some deep conceptual misunderstanding of general covariance and gravitational waves.'' Despite this is not a surprising result (to say it ironically, one knows that Einstein understood a lot of general relativity), the author concludes with remarks praising the meaning of his own work. Finally, it should be stated that, in consideration of the historical facts and the presented text, the title of the paper is misleading and painful.