Uploaded April 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Dirac Medallists Alessandra Buonanno, Thibault Damour and Frans Pretorius are interviewed by ICTP Director Atish Dabholkar. They were awarded the Dirac Medal in 2021, alongside Saul Teukolsky, "for establishing the predicted properties of gravitational waves in the curvature of spacetime produced when stars or black holes spiral together and merge." Their theoretical contributions were key to the detection of gravitational waves, which were observed for the first time by the LIGO collaboration in 2015.
In this conversation, they discuss their decades-long journey defying many analytical and numerical challenges to calculate the gravitational signal resulting from two black holes spiralling together before they merge.
The interview took place in August 2022, when Buonanno, Damour and Pretorius visited ICTP to attend the Dirac Medal Ceremony for their award.
00:00 Introduction
01:20 Inspiralling black holes
07:35 Effective One Body Approximation
13:10 Cosmic Censorship
14:53 Numerical Relativity
17:12 Numerical computations for inspiralling black holes
27:54 Comparing the analytical with the numerical
30:37 Understanding the results
33:37 The role of the community
41:39 Embarking on a generational scientific endeavour
Dirac Medallists Alessandra Buonanno, Thibault Damour and Frans Pretorius are interviewed by ICTP Director Atish Dabholkar. They were awarded the Dirac Medal in 2021, alongside Saul Teukolsky, "for establishing the predicted properties of gravitational waves in the curvature of spacetime produced when stars or black holes spiral together and merge." Their theoretical contributions were key to the detection of gravitational waves, which were observed for the first time by the LIGO collaboration in 2015.
In this conversation, they discuss their decades-long journey defying many analytical and numerical challenges to calculate the gravitational signal resulting from two black holes spiralling together before they merge.
The interview took place in August 2022, when Buonanno, Damour and Pretorius visited ICTP to attend the Dirac Medal Ceremony for their award.
00:00 Introduction
01:20 Inspiralling black holes
07:35 Effective One Body Approximation
13:10 Cosmic Censorship
14:53 Numerical Relativity
17:12 Numerical computations for inspiralling black holes
27:54 Comparing the analytical with the numerical
30:37 Understanding the results
33:37 The role of the community
41:39 Embarking on a generational scientific endeavour
