In a way it's a bit more surprising Einstein didn't get the Nobel prize earlier for his Brownian motion paper from the same year as his special relativity and p

In a way it's a bit more surprising Einstein didn't get the Nobel prize earlier for his Brownian motion paper from the same year as his special relativity and photoelectric effect papers. It's the most beautiful of his three great papers of 1905. [pdf: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/einstein_brownian05.pdf http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/einstein_... ] General Relativity was under active development in 1920-1921, and it is so fundamentally different from Special Relativity that it is unfortunate that each theory shares half a name with the other. (Even more unfortunate is that it took a few decades to arrive at a mathematical and conceptual understanding SR in a GR context as simply one of an infinite number of possible hyperbolizations of a first order quasilinear system of PDEs along the lines of the Einstein Field Equations, or alternatively as a low energy effective field theory in the sense of Kenneth G Wilson (which is what GR itself might be in turn) -- that all became possible only because of mathematical and calculational discoveries made well after Einstein's death). Special Relativity was surely worthy of a Nobel prize once its relationship with Minkowski space and the Lorentz and Poincaré isometry groups became fully understood (all by the mid-1910s), but General Relativity had also just become Nobel worthy thanks to the 1919 expedition. So a Nobel prize for a special-case theory which may have seemed like it was about to be overthrown by a generalization by its originator? Or push the award off into the future after General Relativity had developed further? Or possibly two Nobel prizes, one for each theory? In 1920-1921, nobody could have known that it would take four decades for GR to become useful for working scientists, nor that SR and Newtonian mechanics would remain in use as (or in) effective theories even in 2016. I wonder how much that line of thought might have weighed on the prize committee's mind, rather than objections raised by a non-physicist philosopher.