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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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In case anyone was wondering about the state of string theory today, this review by Sean Carroll of Lee Smolin's new book, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, and the subsequent debate in the comment thread (in which Lee Smolin participates) gives a good picture. I gave myself permission to skip over the bits that read like this:
"The correlation function W(x,y) ~ |x-y|^-2h. is clearly not diffeomorphism invariant."and instead attempt to grasp the bits that read like this:
"[A fundamental theory] cannot-by definition-have a more fundamental underpinning. So it must stand up on its own. This means we must be able to formulate it cleanly and precisely and the important properties it enjoys should be theorems. It doesn’t mean physicists should all work at a rigorous level, but that rigorous framework must be there to refer to.
This is not an unrealizable ideal. Classical Newtonian mechanics satisfies it. So does classical statistical mechanics, ordinary non-relativisitic quantum mechanics and general relativity. In each of these cases there is a body of rigorous results and a community of mathematical physicists who work on them.
Is this too much to hope for theories of quantum gravity. No!"