Speaker
Description
I highlight some of Eric's seminal contributions to our understanding
of the two body problem in general relativity, from the 1990s at
Caltech until today, and use them as a springboard
for a discussion of two recent research directions. The first is the development of general
methods to define and derive coarse-grained variables to describe the
motion of macroscopic bodies, valid in contexts with nonlinear self-interactions. These
methods are complementary to the methods of effective field theory,
and build off earlier formalisms in the linear context by Detweiler and Whiting
and by Harte. The second is an effort to understand in what regimes
the dynamics of a two body system can be uniquely and/or usefully split
into a conservative, Hamiltonian sector and a dissipative sector.
