Besides the technical reason for preferring that binary stars should not decay in their orbits, one might speculate that another motive encouraging belief in the existence of a static two-body solution was the same as that for Einstein's instinctive choice of a static cosmology. There is an ancient prejudice that the universe in general is static and unchanging. Perhaps astronomers had a bias in favor of stellar systems that did not decay, just as in the days of Laplace, and so they preferred to leave gravitational waves out of the picture when it came to such apparently natural producers of radiation.
Traveling at the Speed of Thought - Daniel Kennefick
1930's scientific bias toward gravitational waves which have now been confirmed by LIGO.
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