Speaker
Description
As two classical black holes inspiral and merge, they emit a significant amount of energy and angular momentum in the form of gravitational waves—a phenomenon now routinely observed by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. Predicting the mass and spin of the final black hole typically requires solving Einstein’s equations through highly accurate numerical-relativity simulations. Surprisingly, recent work (https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22388) has shown that the mass and the spin of the final black hole can also be predicted by a maximum entropy principle. In this talk I discuss the notion of entropy of the classical gravitational field and argue that black hole mergers provide a striking example of how classical gravity meets classical information.