Clifford Will

The Confrontation between general relativity and experiment

At various times during its 100-year history, relativity was considered the playground of the theorist, not the experimentalist. Although the 1905 special relativity was quickly integrated into mainstream physics and was subjected to numerous experimental tests, the 1915 general relativity remained outside the mainstream for almost half a century. But during the past 40 years a revolution has occurred, and the confrontation between general relativity and experiment is a vigorous, ongoing enterprise. We will review the current status of experimental tests of the theory, and will describe how the future detection of gravitational radiation may provide powerful new tests of the theory in its strong-field, dynamical regime. These tests will rely upon sophisticated calculations of gravitational-wave and strong-field phenomena using both approximation techniques and large scale-numerical computations. The current status of these calculations will be reviewed.