Gravitational Waves from Compact Binaries as Probes of the Universe

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.