The story of Quantum Gravity Research and emergence theory began in 2009 when the group’s founder, Klee Irwin, synthesized connections through studying the vast body of quantum gravity literature available that led to a new idea on a quantum gravity theory that brings together hyperdimensional geometry, artificial neural network theory and quasicrystalline code based language theory. The most unorthodox aspect of the idea was how it dealt with the correlation between consciousness and physics, known to scientists as the “measurement problem”. Bringing consciousness into the mathematics as a fundamental element, it begins to be an operator that acts on the syntactically free parts of the geometric language undergirding the theory. He envisioned a specific substructure of spacetime at the smallest scale, so that in this view physical reality is like a mosaic tiling language of Planck scale, 3-dimensional, tetrahedron-shaped pixels. The geometric language is created by projecting the 8-dimensional E8 lattice to 3D and 4D. E8 can be understood as the touch points of the densest packing of 8-dimensional spheres and unifies all particles and forces other than gravity. 

Armed with this new approach to the sought after unification theory and with a strong desire to (in Klee’s words) “find out what the hell reality actually is”, he founded Quantum Gravity Research, a not for profit theoretical physics institute based in Los Angeles. The first physicist to join the organization was Fang Fang, who received her PhD in plasma physics from UCLA. They went to work developing the ideas into more rigorous mathematical form. The key was their discovery of a new way to express curvature as rotation – a way to encode the information of the E8 crystal into their mosaic-like patterns of regular tetrahedra in 3D space.

The group currently has over 20 scientists world-wide working on emergence theory.