LIGO

[nibot]

I'm finding Peter Saulson's Fundamentals of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors to be an excellent introduction to the subject—readable, accessible, informative. It's a little bit dated by it's optimistic tone (which I nonetheless do find quite refreshing), though:

The next few years should see the commissioning of several new gravitational wave detectors of unprecidented sensitivity. There is real excitement for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S., VIRGO and GEO in Europe, and all of the other gravitational observatories that may soon be built. While ultimate success is not guaranteed, the prospects are good that the world will soon be equipped with a network of gravitational wave detectors sensitive enough to record numerous signals of astronomical origin, broadband enough to allow waveform analyis that may reveal the structure of the sources, and widespread and redundant enough to allow location of the sources on the sky by triangulation. With such a functioning network, it should be possible to experimentally verify the basic physics of gravitational waves, as predicted by the General Theory of Relativity.

What happened?

Comments

"What happened?"

[vyncentvega.livejournal.com]

Gov't funding?

Re: "What happened?"

[nibot.livejournal.com]

What do you mean? What I mean is, "Back then everyone was excited about how awesome it was going to be, and now they just dwell on how it's 'the science of null results.'"

[onhava.livejournal.com]

What did he mean by "soon"? Was the original plan to make the first LIGO a machine actually capable of doing astronomy? When I visited the LIGO at Hanford in summer 2000 they seemed pretty resigned to it just being sort of a proof-of-principle, so I wonder exactly when the optimism declined. Still, LIGO 2 and LISA will get us there eventually, right?

I love it when I find 15-year-old particle physics papers that talk about how the SSC will conclusively show whether their model is right.