The long road to LIGO | Science | AAAS
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/long-road-ligo
The quest to build the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was a story of ingenuity and persistence—and a decades-long scientific soap opera.
In 1972, Rainer Weiss, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, described how a device called an interferometer could detect
ripples in spacetime. But LIGO, two giant interferometers in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, didn’t take data until 2002. It finally scored a discovery
on 14 September 2015, after a 5-year, $205 million upgrade.
The idea for LIGO gathered steam only after Kip Thorne, a theorist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, took an interest, Weiss says. In
the summer of 1975, the two attended a NASA workshop in Washington, D.C. Thorne had forgotten to book a hotel room, so Weiss took him in and the two talked all night.
Thorne had doubted Weiss’s scheme and had even suggested in a textbook that it couldn’t work. Now, Weiss says, Thorne “flipped completely, saying what was in his book
was wrong and becoming an advocate.”