I've been posting a bit over at nibot_lab , my more technical / sciencey livejournal. Check it out if you're interested.

One of our current efforts at LIGO is to increase the laser power. The sensitivity of our gravitational wave detector is ultimately limited by the granularity of light*. The light coming out of our detector, like any light, is packaged up in little bundles of energy, photons . In any given length of time, the number of photons coming out of the detector is an integer. We can't measure half...