(*no prior knowledge of General Relativity will be assumed*)

When studying the late-time asymptotics of solutions to the (linearised) Einstein equations in gravitational collapse as an evolutionary problem, we’re faced with the difficulty that we have no direct physical information that tells us what to assume on initial data.

In this talk, I will show how different assumptions on initial data translate into different decay rates at late times.

In order to circumvent the problem of not knowing what to assume on initial data, I will then present a scattering construction for the linearised Einstein equations from the infinite past. The key advantage is that, in the scattering approach, we have direct, physically motivated predictions on what to assume on the scattering data.