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I've been doing some reading up on this and as I understand it, the way all this works is that we start out with classical theory that describes vibrating strings (eg: violin strings). This is then extended to describe relativistic strings by incorporating Special Relativity (SR). This in turn is then made into a quantum theory (QM), by quantising things (ie: frequencies etc). As a by-product of these operations, full General Relativity (GR) then 'pops' out in the mathematical workings !
In this sense, it could be argued that String Theory's greatest 'prediction' is gravity ... which turns out to be indistinguishable from General Relativity. (Indistinguishable that is, in the range where GR has been observed (demonstrated) to work). Even though we already know about GR, it is one of the curious aspects of Superstring theory, that GR is produced … without any prior GR thinking/assumptions. So, in other words, postulating strings leads invariably to GR !
GR and String theory deviate at the planck scale (which is because the combination of Quantum Mechanics, (QM), and GR become inconsistent at that scale anyway).
At the moment, it appears that string theory handles the GR singularities at these scales in a better way, but I don't think anyone has developed the calculations to demonstrate this yet.
String theory is not constrained properly yet … and allows way too many solutions. The 'extra dimensions' can only be detected at extremely high energies .. not really able to be replicated any time soon.
Oh .. and 'yes' .. apparently, string theory can also derive black holes.
Cheers
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