Where is string theory today?
Here’s the laundry list:
– SUSY gauge theory and its application to the study of manifold invariants.
– Amplitudes i.e. reformulating the rules of perturbative calculations in SYM and SUGRA using twistor and other methods
– Higher spin gravity in AdS (Vasiliev) and its description in terms of CFTs
– application of AdS/CFT to condensed matter, hydrodynamics, quark-gluon plasma, study of entanglement entropy of quantum systems
– extended objects in M-theory
– Firewall debate (einstein-rosen = einstein-podolsky-rosen? see paper by Maldacena)