Consider the nonlinear scalar field equation \begin{equation} \label{a1} -\Delta{u}= f(u)\quad\text{in}~\mathbb{R}^N,\qquad u\in H^1(\mathbb{R}^N), \end{equation} where $N\geq3$ and $f$ satisfies the general Berestycki-Lions conditions. We are interested in the existence of positive ground states, of nonradial solutions and in the multiplicity of radial and nonradial solutions. Very recently Mederski [30] made a major advance in that direction through the development, in an abstract setting, of a new critical point theory for constrained functionals. In this paper we propose an alternative, more elementary approach, which permits to recover Mederski's results on the scalar field equation. The keys to our approach are an extension to the symmetric mountain pass setting of the monotonicity trick, and a new decomposition result for bounded Palais-Smale sequences.

The merger phase of binary black hole coalescences is a transient between an initial oscillating regime (inspiral) and a late exponentially damped phase (ringdown). In spite of the non-linear character of Einstein equations, the merger dynamics presents a surprisingly simple behaviour consistent with effective linearity. On the other hand, energy loss through the event horizon and by scattering to infinity renders the system non-conservative. Hence, the infinitesimal generator of the (effective) linear dynamics is a non-selfadjoint operator. Qualitative features of transients in linear dynamics driven by non-selfadjoint (in general, non-normal) operators are captured by the pseudospectrum of the time generator. We propose the pseudospectrum as a unifying framework to thread together the phases of binary black hole coalescences, from the inspiral-merger transition up to the late quasinormal mode ringdown.