These claims were not widely accepted prior to about 1955, but after the introduction of the bead argument, any remaining doubts soon disappeared from the research literature.
In 1922, Arthur Stanley Eddington wrote a paper expressing (apparently for the first time) the view that gravitational waves are in essence ripples in coordinates, and have no physical meaning.
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.
In other words, Einstein believed that he and Rosen had established that their new argument showed that the prediction of gravitational radiation was a mathematical artifact of the linear approximation he had employed in 1916.
Einstein believed these plane waves would gravitationally collapse into points; he had long hoped something like this would explain quantum mechanical wave-particle duality.
Quite uncharacteristically, Einstein took this criticism very badly, angrily replying "I see no reason to address the, in any case erroneous, opinion expressed by your referee."
Leopold Infeld, who arrived at Princeton University at this time, later remembered his utter astonishment on hearing of this development, since radiation is such an essential element for any classical field theory worthy of the name.
In a letter to the editor of Physical Review, Robertson wryly reported that in the end, Einstein had fully accepted the objections that had initially so upset him.
In 1955, an important conference honoring the semi-centennial of special relativity was held in Bern, the Swiss capital city where Einstein was working in the famous patent office during the Annus mirabilis.
[10] He gave the first correct description of the relative (tidal) acceleration of initially mutually static test particles that encounter a sinusoidal gravitational plane wave.