The bit I found most interesting:<p>"The current excitement could easily be a false alarm. Even if LIGO has a promising signal, it may be a false test signal planted as a drill. It's been done before, in 2010 near the end of LIGO's last pre-upgrade run. Three members of the LIGO team are empowered to move the mirrored blocks by just the right traces in just the right way. Only they know the truth, and the test protocol is that they not reveal a planted signal until the collaboration has finished analyzing it and is ready to publish a paper and hold a press conference. “Blind tests” like this are the gold standard in all branches of science."<p>Getting to the point of publishing a paper and holding a press conference seems like a lot of potentially wasted effort on a fire-drill type exercise. Presumably there are reasons why they wouldn't just let everyone know that it was a drill when they'd all decided on a conclusion? I realise that I'm assuming that the point of drawing that conclusion is much earlier than completing the paper as well, which may not be true.
From the comments: "... how much noise exists in the measurement environment? I find it difficult to believe something even as mundane as a minuscule earthquake or similar ground noise wouldn’t cause orders of magnitude more of a signal and therefore swamp out any meaning information"<p>This is also the first thing that came to my mind. How do the filter noise? Or are we missing something that is not described in the article?<p>And secondly, why not putting ( teoretically) this lasers into space? Aside the solar radiation/wind, not much would interfere if put around the Lagrange points.
my intuition says this is impossible to detect as if space time is bent then all the equipment and our reality is bent along with it and thus we will be none the wiser.... ie we might be inside a bent reality but we and all our sensing equipment will still sense everything as straight.