General Relativity in the LIGO era (and QFT)

We shall pose the question whether the strong field comparable-mass two body problem in GR admits an approximation with only a few degrees of freedom (rather than the gravitational field throughout space). We shall discuss the merits and shortcomings of the standard Effective One Body approach and discuss a new and different line of research. This shall be preceded by a background section, consisting of two brief reviews. First we shall review the Effective Field Theory approach where field theoretic ideas are used to make progress on the two-body problem in GR. Secondly  a novel geometric method to compute Feynman diagrams, called Symmetries of Feynman Integrals,  will be mentioned.