Expanding the record on Einstein and peer review

In his fascinating article “Einstein Versus the Physical Review,” Daniel Kennefick notes that “the gravitational wave paper [1936] was Einstein’s first encounter with the anonymous peer-review system practiced in American journals at that time.” Kennefick says two of Albert Einstein’s previous Physical Review papers had not been refereed.

As a beginning graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, I was greatly pleased that my professor, Heinz Barschall, added my name as an author to a paper he submitted to the Physical Review in 1948; it was my first paper as an author. I had provided only minor assistance in taking the data and operating the accelerator we used in the experiment, and Heinz’s generous gesture was important to me. With so little experience, I was not surprised that Heinz was quite annoyed when the paper was returned with a referee’s comments, even though they were not unfavorable. He explained that the Physical Review had a regular policy of accepting papers from recognized physicists at well-known institutions without submission to a referee and that he never before had had a paper sent to a referee. That included a 1938 theoretical paper he had written with John Wheeler, which presented what was perhaps the first solid evidence of very strong spin–orbit forces in nuclei. ¹

Editor John Tate’s submission of the Einstein–Rosen paper to a referee might therefore have reasonably been seen by Einstein as unusual and even disrespectful. As a one-time editor myself (Physical Review Letters, 1978–84), I know that being correct, and even helpful, as Tate certainly was, does not defuse an author’s objection to an editor’s criticism.