Dirac conversations: Buonanno, Damour, Pretorius

ICTP is a hub for international science, attracting thousands of scientists each year, including some of the most prestigious physicists and mathematicians in the world. Hundreds of Nobel laureates, Fields medallists, and ICTP Dirac medallists have visited ICTP over the years, sharing their insights and perspectives with ICTP's international science community. ICTP is capturing some of these insights in its video series of "ICTP Conversations" and "Dirac Conversations". All were conducted by ICTP Director Atish Dabholkar, sometimes accompanied by members of the Centre's faculty.

In a video recorded in August 2022, Dirac Medallists Alessandra Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Germany), Thibault Damour (Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques - IHES, France) and Frans Pretorius (Princeton University, USA) were interviewed by Director Dabholkar while they were visiting the centre to attend the ceremony for their award. The three were awarded the 2021 Dirac Medal along with 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.