What was Einstein's “Fateful Prejudice”?

Abstract

In the later pages of the notebook, as Einstein let general covariance slip away, he devised and abandoned a new proposal for his gravitational field equations. This same proposal, revived nearly three years later, opened passage to his final theory. In abandoning it in the notebook, Einstein had all but lost his last chance of deliverance. This chapter reports and develops our group's accounts of this decision. Einstein's later accounts of this decision blame it upon what he called the ``fateful prejudice'' of misinterpreting the Christoffel symbols. We suggest that Einstein's aberrant use and understanding of coordinate systems and coordinate conditions was as important as another fateful prejudice.