Space-borne gravitational wave detectors, such as the proposed Laser
Interferometer Space Antenna, are expected to observe black hole coalescences
to high redshift and with large signal-to-noise ratios, rendering their
gravitational waves ideal probes of fundamental physics. The promotion of
Newton's constant to a time-function introduces modifications to the binary's
binding energy and the gravitational wave luminosity, leading to corrections in
the chirping frequency. Such corrections propagate into the response function
and, given a gravitational wave observation, they allow for constraints on the
first time-derivative of Newton's constant at the time of merger. We find that
space-borne detectors could indeed place interesting constraints on this
quantity as a function of sky position and redshift, providing a
{\emph{constraint map}} over the entire range of redshifts where binary black
hole mergers are expected to occur. A LISA observation of an equal-mass
inspiral event with total redshifted mass of 10^5 solar masses for three years
should be able to measure G˙/G at the time of merger to better than
10^(-11)/yr.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, replaced with version accepted for publication
in Phys. Rev. D