The study of scattering amplitudes has uncovered extraordinary dualities
linking real-world particles such as gravitons, gluons, and pions. We
discuss how these developments have been amalgamated with classic tools
from effective field theory to derive new results relevant to the search
for gravitational waves at LIGO. This approach has produced now
state-of-the-art results on conservative orbital dynamics of binary
black holes in the post-Minkowskian expansion. We also comment on recent
work extending this framework to include tidal effects and spin.