Can gravitational waves create detectable ripples in light?

Gravitational waves squeeze and stretch spacetime, and any light traveling through that distortion gets nudged too. Working from Maxwell's equations in curved spacetime, this framework calculates exactly how large that nudge is: for a typical LIGO-scale gravitational wave, the induced electromagnetic disturbance is roughly one part in 10¹⁹ of the original light amplitude. That's extraordinarily faint, but the clean analytic result sets a firm baseline for any proposed gravitational-wave detector based on electromagnetic sensing.