In many ways, twenty years of further failure have had less than no effect. Lubos Motl is still arguing that string theory is the language in which God wrote the universe, and Michio Kaku has a new book about to appear, in which it looks like string field theory is described by the God Equation. Ignoring these extreme examples, string theory remains remarkably well-entrenched in mainstream physics: for example, my university regularly offers a course training undergraduates in string theory, and prestigious $3 million prizes are routinely given for work on the subject. The usual mechanisms according to which a failed scientific idea is supposed to fall by the wayside for some reason have not had an effect.
While string theory’s failures have gotten a lot of popular press, the situation is rather different within the physics community. One reason I was interested in publishing the article in Physics Today was that discussion of this issue belongs there, in a place it could get serious attention from within the field. To this day, that has not happened. The story of my article was that I finally did hear back from Lubkin on 2/21/2001. She told me that she would talk to the Physics Today editor Stephen Benka about it. I heard from Benka on 5/6/2001, who told me they wouldn’t publish an article like that, but that I should rework it for publication as a shorter letter to the editor. I did this and sent a short letter version back to them, never heard anything back (a few months later I wrote to ask what had happened to my letter, was told they had decided not to publish it, but didn’t bother to let me know). In 2002 an editor from American Scientist contacted me about the article, and it ended up getting published there.