What can we do with string theory?

Much progress has been made in our understanding of string theory over the last few years. There are, however, a number of crucial issues that are not well understood—issues which prevent us from bringing the string’s predictive power to fruition. Nonetheless, even without the ability, at present, to truly assess the relevance of the string as a fundamental unified theory, string theory has provided us with a number of important and striking advances in both physics and mathematics. The string has proven itself to be a powerful calculation tool by facilitating the evaluation of QCD scattering amplitudes and the computation of certain (quasi) topological properties of an interesting class of geometrical spaces. The string has also begun to significantly enhance our understanding of spacetime under extreme conditions. After a brief introduction to string theory, we discuss these developments as well as the present status of attempts to extract observable physics from the string.