The detection of gravitational waves will obviously have immediate repercussions on astrophysics and cosmology, but in this blackboard-talk I will concentrate on its impact on our knowledge of fundamental gravity. I will present from a field theory perspective what can be learnt from a detection of gravitational waves by the large interferometric detectors LIGO and Virgo which will resume data taking activities in the next months.
In particular, solutions of non-linear equations describing the gravitational two-body dynamics by iterating over linear solutions suggest to organize the computation in
terms of Feynman diagrams like in quantum field theory. Other features like cutoff, renormalization, running, will prove useful here as in quantum field theory, because of the field theory underlying structure. As a working example and time permitting, I will sketch the derivation of the gravitational two-body potential at first post-Newtonian order.
