One would emphasize that recent Landscape trouble has emphasized the problems of string theory. Before 2005 there was a tendency to believe that string theory was a “fantastic approach,” and it never was a serious candidate as a theory of quantum gravity.
String theory always was in trouble but in the past, the debate and the criticism to obvious technical errors and inconsistencies was only published in specialized literature accessible to specialized scientists. Fortunately, criticism to string theory is today published in mass media, and the public can know the truth about string theory 'success'. For example, Robert B. Laughlin, 1998 Nobel Prize-winning physicist says
People have been changing string theory in wild ways because it has never worked.
Therefore, i would personally rename New Scientist title to Is today string theory more in trouble that yesterday or similar one.
Susskind proposes anthropic reasoning and string theory as the only approach to understand the cosmological constant. Well this is not correct, the flaws of the anthropic reasoning are being discussed in a number of sites.
However, scientific approaches to understand the nature of the cosmological constant are being published on specialized literature. Canonical science (via tau-frame dynamics) also agrees with the hypothesis of a strong link between cosmological parameters and microscopic mass, but it is not clear the role of the graviton there. In any case, we already know that the graviton concept arising in string theory is, naturally, incorrect.
I repeat again, by no means the stringy Landscape argument is the only possible way to explain cosmological constant. In fact, one may note that any Landscape way is not a scientific explanation, just metaphysical one. Landscape is just a return to so-called magic era before modern science born.
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Additional comments on anthropic nonsense, scientific criticism, technical data, and useful links and references are available on canonical science today entry.
A previous short reply to the interview is available on the New Scientist thread: Does the man who invented string theory make a good job of defending it?
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