Twenty-five Questions for String Theorists

Gordon Kane and his collaborators have just published a review paper on the phenomenological aspects of string theory: hep-th/0509157. If you are an outsider to string theory (like me), you may wonder what are these people are really working on. String theory is advertised as a very beautiful solution to the unification of physical laws (or the question to the answer 42). But if they established such a theory what are those thousands of strings theorists trying to figure out? One answer is to find the M-theory, the non-perturbative completion of the string theory. The other answer is to connect proposed Planck scale physics to our experimental capabilities. This new paper is a compilation of 25 open questions in this second category and also it is a good resource for outsiders to understand the cutting-edge issues and where the problems may lie. I just wonder what percent of string theory is along these lines.