I was browsing through Foundations of Space and Time, a compilation of essays on various theories of quantum gravity. The following passage in the introduction intrigued me:


  Each compactification leads to a different vacuum state.... at least one state should describe our Universe in its entirety.... the enormous number (~10^500 at last count) of solutions, with no perturbative mechanism to select mechanism to select among them, leads some critics to question the predictive power of the theory..Even more worrying is that, while the theory is perturbatively finite order by order, the perturbation series does not seem to converge.


I don't know anything about string theory and so I could not make head or tails this. All I know is that ~$10^{500}$    is a very large number. 


What exactly is a 'solution' in string theory? Is it a spacetime metric of some sort or the terms of a S-matrix of some sort?  
Why are there so many 'solutions'? 
I thought string theory was supposed to be finite, why do perturbative series still diverge?
Is there any experimental technique to limit the number of 'solutions'?  
Will experimental techniques be able to pinpoint a solution within present day string theorists' lifetimes too? If not, how long will it take before we can experimentally probe these things? 
Are string theorists completely relaxed about these issues? Or are they in anguish? 



Question: Wordpress and isotope filtering
Answer: Not sure you got Isotope and filters working yet ??

There are 2 things I think you missed


the Filters need to be wrapped in a class (so that the jquery can be actioned by the click on the a links) like so:

&lt;ul id="options"&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#" data-filter="*"&gt;show all&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#" data-filter=".web"&gt;web&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#" data-filter=".mobile"&gt;mobile&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;



NB the data-filter are CaSe sensitive (so they won't work if they don't match your WordPress categories or whatever you use.


The isotope jquery needs to be made safe for WordPress - to run in no-conflict mode


Here's the original code from Isotope documentation

// filter items when filter link is clicked
$('#filters a').click(function(){
var selector = $(this).attr('data-filter');
$container.isotope({ filter: selector });
return false;
});


Here's the code changed for WordPress

// filter items when filter link is clicked
jQuery('#options a').click(function(){
var selector = jQuery(this).attr('data-filter');
mycontainer.isotope({ filter: selector });
return false;
});


NB put this in after the rest of your isotope script
and note that #options is the class from your filter list in the HTML :)

You can see it working at damien.co/isotope

Hope that helped you?