I was at Caltech when LIGO was being built. Kip Thorne gave a great lecture in the engineering school about how they went about knowing what to try to engineer

I was at Caltech when LIGO was being built. Kip Thorne gave a great lecture in the engineering school about how they went about knowing what to try to engineer in the first place. I'm not an expert on LIGO, but based on the seminars I attended it sounded like there was a lot of science that went into figuring out what the engineering team needed to do.