Silberstein taught in Rome until 1920, when he entered private research for the Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester, New York.
Though the text was not published in the proceedings of the Congress, it did appear in the Philosophical Magazine of May, 1912, with the title "Quaternionic form of relativity".
Nature expressed some misgivings:[6] In his review[7] Morris R. Cohen wrote, "Dr. Silberstein is not inclined to emphasize the revolutionary character of the new ideas, but rather concerned to show their intimate connection with older ones."
Another review[8] by Maurice Solovine states that Silberstein subjected the relativity principle to an exhaustive examination in the context of, and with respect to, the principal problems of mathematical physics taken up at the time.
[9] The influence of these lectures on John Lighton Synge has been noted: Silberstein gave a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1924 in Toronto: A finite world-radius and some of its cosmological implications.
In response, Einstein and Nathan Rosen published a Letter[14] to the Editor in which they pointed out a critical flaw in Silberstein's reasoning.
Unconvinced, Silberstein took the debate to the popular press, with The Evening Telegram in Toronto publishing an article titled "Fatal blow to relativity issued here" on March 7, 1936.
[15] Nonetheless, Einstein was correct and Silberstein was wrong: as we know today, all solutions to Weyl's family of axisymmetric metrics, of which Silberstein's is one example, necessarily contain singular structures ("struts", "ropes", or "membranes") that are responsible for holding masses against the attractive force of gravity in a static configuration.
[16] According to Martin Claussen,[17] Ludwik Silberstein initiated a line of thought involving eddy currents in the atmosphere, or fluids generally.