David N. Schwartz has objected that this is both unproven and unlikely. Fermi then submitted revised versions of the paper to Italian and German publications, which accepted and published them in those languages in 1933 and 1934. The paper did not appear at the time in a primary publication in English. An English translation of the seminal paper was published in the American Journal of Physics in 1968.

Fermi found the initial rejection of the paper so troubling that he decided to take