  The future detection of gravitational wave forces us to consider the many
ways in which astrophysics, gravitational wave theory and fundamental theory
will interact. In this paper, I summarize some recent work done to develop such
an interface. In particular, I concentrate on how non-vacuum astrophysical
environments can modify the gravitational wave signal emitted by compact binary
inspirals, and whether signatures from the former are detectable by current and
future gravitational wave detectors. I also describe the interface between
gravitational wave modeling and fundamental theory, focusing on the status of
the parameterized post-Einsteinian framework (a general framework to detect
deviations away from General Relativity in future gravitational wave data) and
its current data analysis implementation.
