[mturmon]

I was at a talk by Janna Levin, astrophysicist and author of a book Black Hole Blues that describes LIGO. (E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/books/review-black-hole-b...)

She gave a neat analogy between GWs, as sensed by LIGO, and an electric guitar. In the sense that a distant pluck on the string is transmitted as a wave down the string to the pickup, which senses a little wiggle in the string and amplifies it. I thought it was a poetic analogy that gives a second meaning to the word "instrument" in this context.

[ehsankia]

Except imagine you're embedded on the string itself and cannot actually sense the string "moving through space". The way you have to measure it is by sensing tiny changes in distance between the left and right side of the string as it wiggles around.

The actual detail of the experiment and the precision they reach is quite fascinating. Veratisium has a pretty good video explaining it in more laymen terms [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10