Musings on Lorentz Violation Given the Recent Gravitational-Wave Observations of Coalescing Binary Black Holes

Abstract

The recent observation of gravitational waves by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration provides a unique opportunity to probe the extreme gravity of coalescing binary black holes. In this regime, the gravitational interaction is not only strong, but the spacetime curvature is large, characteristic velocities are a non-negligible fraction of the speed of light, and the time scale on which the curvature and gravity change is small. This contribution discusses some consequences of these observations on modifications to General Relativity, with a special emphasis on Lorentz-violating theories.