  The major source of ground-based gravitational wave detectors, the inspiral
and merger of comparable mass binary black holes (BBH), consists of a slow
quasicircular inspiral, a merger to form a single remnant hole, and the
quasinormal ringing of that remnant. The first and last of these epochs are
amenable to well developed and familiar approximations: Newtonian or
post-Newtonian for the first, and BH perturbation methods for the last.
Ironically, the middle epoch, the merger, generates most of the GW emission,
yet has been accessible so far only to numerical relativity. Here we add the
close-limit approximation for the phenomenology of the merger. With the
completed set of methods (Newtonian/post-Newtonian; close limit; BH
perturbation theory) we show that not only can we understand the results of BBH
coalescence, but - with reasonable accuracy - we can {\it predict} the
resulting radiation and remnant.

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology