LIGO is not a white elephant...when I was taking General Relativity a decade ago, Ligo was in the planning stage, we did many homework problems that involved LIGO... it has a real chance of detecting gravity waves... It is an amazing project!

The LIGO project requires perfect optics... I studied their studies, they helped advance optics and I used their reports to solve problems... They have done a lot before getting results...

This is a project that needs precision to such a magnitude that the technology did not exist a few years ago... they helped make such precision possible...

I feel certain it will detect some of the more violent events... such as orbiting black holes, asymmetric supernovae etc...

Gravitational radiation is NOT a theory... while never directly observed, it has been indirectly observed...