8 Conclusions

Einstein’s theory of general relativity celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2015 as perhaps the most elegant and successful attempt by humankind to capture the laws of physics.

Until recently, this theory has been studied mostly in the weak-field regime, where it passed all experimental and observational tests with flying colors. Studies in the strong-field regime, in contrast, largely concerned the mathematical structure of the theory but made few and indirect connections with observation and experiment. Then, a few years ago, a phase transition in the field of strong gravity occurred: on one hand, new experimental efforts are promising to test gravity for the first time in the strong field regime; on the other hand, a new tool – numerical relativity – has made key breakthroughs opening up the regime of strong-field gravity phenomena for accurate modelling. Driven by these advances, gravitation in the strong-field regime has proven to have remarkable connections to other branches of physics.

With the rise of numerical relativity as a major tool to model and study physical processes involving strong gravity, decade-old problems – brushed aside for their complexity – are now tackled with the use of personal or high-performance computers. Together with analytic methods, old and new, the new numerical tools are pushing forward one of the greatest human endeavours: understanding the universe.