Thanks, Ken!

Elaborating: superstring theory has already proven useful for a number of things--- in pure math.

What might be the very general lines of the most likely future development? I'd like to suggest an analogy which probably won't sustain being taken too far: harmonic analysis first arose in the work of Fourier on temperature distributions, and it was immediately effective there. But suppose it hadn't. Then mathematicians would have noticed that Fourier's ideas suggested how to develop a fundemental method of analyzing some purely mathematical problems, and after another century of development of things like operator theory, with the rise of some new branch of physics (quantum physics played this role in the history of harmonic analysis), it would have turned out that harmonic analysis provided the perfect tools to solve problems involving this new kind of physics.

In other words: simply because superstring theory is universally acclaimed (by those mathematicians who have studied it) as beautiful and compelling, and because it has already proven useful in solving hard mathematical problems, I have no doubt that superstring theory will be developed even further, in ways we can hardly guess at right now, and eventually, like any great theory in mathematics, it will be applied succesfully to the sciences. Just how and when I cannot guess, but I am confident it will be applied (barring a mass die-off of Apis mellifera, or something else causing the collapse of the global economy, which would presumably result in a mass die-off of Homo sapiens, to the detriment of science, unless nonhuman scientists have been allowed to flourish beforehand).

__________________
Chris Hillman

Read these PF posts. Avoid Wikipedia--- except for these versions. Read this and this suggested sticky. When asked for advice, I always say: never take advice!