LIGO = Laser Interferometer Gravity-wave Observator is a successful attempt by several important people to sell the government outmoded technology to build what will be a phenomonally expensive observatory presently pegged at over one third of a billion (up from an intitial $192 million proposed cost of course). This monster will blight the funding prospects of a generation of young scientists, and didn't even profit the hopeful egos who pushed it through; they have largely been booted off the project now that it has a life of its own and demands competent managers.
Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's "Gravitation" speculates widely on every possible way of detecting gravitational waves and doesn't even mention interferometers (ironically). The reason is that they are technically unpromising.
But LIGO has a "chief theorist," which is something difficult to find out (go ahead, try the LIGO homepages), but apparently true ( Physics Today, Dec 1994, p. 57 ). Quick, who's the chief theorist for HST? Hard to think of other operating observatories that have a "chief theorist." I'm really mad that I missed the announcement for the position (there WAS an announcement wasn't there?). True, it would be a strenuous job, but most cheerleading jobs are ("Gimme an 'L', gimme an 'I', ... ").
Prediction (Dec 1994): 10 years after "first dark," this lemon will be declared a "success" (something to the effect of "setting new limits" and "providing important constraints") and we'll have some more empty holes as monuments to Big Science.
The chief theorist has a different prediction, namely that after construction, an "advanced LIGO" will pop up that will be 100 times more sensitive to wave amplitude (thus 10,000 times more sensitive to wave energy). This California Deaming can be found in Three hundred years of gravitation (Hawking and Israel, Cambridge Press, 1987, p. 433): "During the years following the first gravity-wave searches in the LIGOs, the experimenters plan to run a sequence of detectors with ever improving sensitivities, pushing the sensitivities ever downward [sic], and improving the seismic isolation so the detectors can operate at ever increasing minimum frequencies. A reasonable [sic] goal ... correspond[s to the curves labeled] \fIadvanced detectors\fR ... ." These curves are another two orders of magnitude yet more sensitive!