“We'll have all sorts of crazy signals. And you'd be a damned fool if you didn't …” — Rainer Weiss

Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.

When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like one a year, maybe even ten a year.

The rule has been that when one opens a new channel to the universe, there is usually a surprise in it. Why should the gravitational channel be deprived of this?

The waves from all the different parts of a sphere would cancel each other out. You need motion that's nonspherical.