Quantum Refuge

Summary

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Radiolab: "Quantum Refuge" (Nov 14, 2025)

Main Theme/Overview

In "Quantum Refuge," Radiolab hosts Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser intimately explore the harrowing reality of life in Gaza through the eyes of Qasem Walid, a 28-year-old Palestinian physicist. By weaving the science of quantum mechanics into testimonies of daily survival, loss, and existential uncertainty, the episode probes how the confusing foundations of reality in physics can become both metaphor and refuge amidst chaos and violence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Many Worlds Interpretation & Qasem’s Reality

• Opening Question: Lulu asks Qasem about the idea of parallel universes as comfort or science.
  • Qasem: "For a person who lives this madness in Gaza, imagining that there is another world ... where I have another version of me living peacefully is very intriguing, but scientifically speaking, I don't actually believe in it so much." [02:35]
  • Qasem rejects escapism, remains rooted in his own reality.

2. Surviving Day-to-Day in Gaza

• Qasem describes search for food, constant bombardment, and daily risks.
  • "Every place here ... whenever I go out from my tent, I pray for myself ... there is no shelter. The only shelter you can take is the guy in front of you." [05:17]

3. Origins—A Physicist’s Childhood

• Childhood fascination: Stargazing on polluted Gaza rooftops, seeing “pearls” in the sky after rain; first curiosity about the Orion Belt. [07:06]
• Father’s influence: An engineer who gave free math and physics lectures, romanticizing science for neighbors.
  • "He would compare the electric current for love ... between spouses." [09:49]
• Father’s political caution and self-censorship due to occupation.
  • "He was like writing diaries and stuff and keeping it for himself, not publishing it." [10:29]
• Parental Loss: Father dies when Qasem is 19; quantum physics, especially, becomes a way to honor and connect with his father’s passion. [10:54]
  • "Maybe in another universe where my dad is alive, I could be still learning from him." [10:59]

4. University Life & Meeting Dr. Sufyan Taya

• University as refuge: The library represents freedom; classes under trees in a campus Qasem considers “the most beautiful place in the whole Gaza Strip.” [11:58]
• Dr. Taya: A poetic, elegant physicist president, described as "a walking book that smells nice." [13:29–14:19]
• Embracing Quantum Mechanics:
  • Dr. Taya demystifies superposition: "You can't fight it." [15:06]
  • Qasem captivated, particularly by quantum tunneling—where particles seemingly pass barriers they “shouldn’t” be able to cross.
    • "We can make our own version of tunneling ... How about to imagine ourselves as electrons and go to the moon? Emotionally, spiritually ... because nothing is free in Gaza." [17:23–18:32]

5. Aspirations Interrupted by War

• Qasem dreams of scholarships, NASA, telescopes.
  • “I wanted to visit NASA, SpaceX, to see the rockets ... not just from the screen ... This is a life I imagine myself.” [19:10]
• Dreams dashed by war:
  • Interrupted by the hum of generators and waning phone battery—a real-time illustration of disrupted life. [19:58–20:30]

6. War's Encroachment—From October 7th On

• Recounts first moments of war: Mistaking the sound of rockets for thunder; “stripes of smoke” across the sky. [24:54–25:27]
• Devastation:
  • University destroyed, family displacement, living in a tent camp. “A new world of tents ... it’s my world now.” [27:47–28:31]
  • Death of his mentor, Dr. Taya, in an Israeli airstrike. [28:42–29:30]
  • "[Dr. Taya] decided to go even further in the north ... that is where he was killed." [29:05]

7. Writing as Survival—Science as Metaphor and Shelter

• Qasem turns private essays and social media into documentation, poetry, and protest.

  • On his aunt’s death: "To speak up, to speak loud, and to scream at the wall to take action." [30:29]
  • Quantum principles permeate his writing—using physics to express both suffering and hope.
  • "My movement is similar to the quantum harmonic oscillator ... It is the water ... that creates the ability to move from a lower energy state to a higher energy state, from more thirsty to less thirsty." [31:19]

• Why physics metaphors?

  • "When you study something, you just live by it ... That's me, a physicist, a student of physics, trying to live a genocide. My haven ... is the world of physics." [32:49]
  • Refuge is not physical, but mental: "If I can escape inside my head ... to the maze of physics ... well, so be it. ... I'm at least using something that I love as a safe zone." [33:42]

8. Collapse of the Box—Schrodinger’s Cat as Personal Metaphor

• Qasem applies thought experiment of Schrodinger’s Cat to his own entrapment.
  • “I have been stuck in this box since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war ... So many people know I'm inside it, but none can tell if I'm alive or dead.” [35:24]
  • "I am the cat." [38:06]
  • “I am the one who is inside the box ... out of reach and out of resources ... It's your turn right now.” [41:47]
  • Plea to listeners/world: “Please open the box.” [42:16]

9. After the Ceasefire—The Box Remains

• Ceasefire brings little real change.

  • "It's the same box, but it gets only quieter ... I don't have a house, I don't have a job. I don't have a life." [44:25]
  • Continues to risk death: "We take the whole distance ... on foot and we were shot at by a quadcopter ... after the official ceasefire." [45:16]

• Wider metaphor: Genocide has “transformed to other shapes”; the persistent struggle for basic existence continues. [45:35]

10. The Stars—Returning to Wonder in Darkness

• Despite it all, stars still represent beauty and knowledge.
  • "There is nothing more beautiful than the stars ... that is when you can see stars all clear." [47:01]
  • “The more I know about them, the more I fell in love with them ... it actually makes me feel good even about myself.” [48:15]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On quantum superposition as lived experience:

  • "Seemingly, my existence has now become identified by the superposition of the states of being simultaneously alive and dead. I'm alive in a lifeless life, and all the possible paths ahead lead to my death."
    – Qasem Walid [37:10]

• On the scientist becoming the subject:

  • “Here, it’s like you went from scientist to object of study.”
    – Lulu Miller [41:42]
  • “Exactly. I am the one who is inside the box ... It’s not up to me. I tried, I failed. And it’s your turn right now.”
    – Qasem Walid [41:47]

• A plea to the world:

  • "In Schrodinger's cat experiment, everyone asked whether the cat was alive or dead, but none actually opened the box to see ... We're not cats. Please open the box."
    – Qasem Walid [42:16]

• Stars as solace:

  • "The more I know about them, the more I fell in love with them ... it actually makes me feel good even about myself."
    – Qasem Walid [48:15]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Many Worlds question, Qasem’s reality: [01:54–03:07]
• Life in Gaza: food scarcity, constant danger: [04:44–06:21]
• Childhood, stargazing, father’s influence: [07:06–11:21]
• University & Dr. Taya: [11:58–16:45]
• Quantum tunneling as metaphor for survival: [17:05–18:32]
• Aspirations interrupted: [19:10–20:30]
• October 7th & war’s effects: [24:54–28:31]
• Dr. Taya’s death: [28:42–29:30]
• Qasem starts writing, blending physics and survival: [30:29–33:42]
• Schrodinger's Cat metaphor—personal entrapment: [35:24–38:06; 41:42–42:16]
• Post-ceasefire—ongoing hardship: [44:25–45:35]
• Refuge in the stars: [47:01–48:15]

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Episode Tone & Style

• Raw, poetic, precise. The fusion of trauma and scientific wonder is rendered in Qasem’s own gentle, sometimes playful, sometimes somber voice. Lulu affirms and gently challenges, while the episode honors the sensory moments—noisy cafes, distant bombs, the hush of darkness—grounding science in lived survival.

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Additional Notes

• Qasem’s essays, including “I Am Stuck in a Box Like Schrodinger’s in Gaza,” are recommended for further reading.
• 2025 Nobel Prize awarded for work on quantum tunneling, connecting the quantum metaphor to the global scientific discourse and the episode’s central motif.

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This episode is a searing account of individual and communal suffering—but also an illustration of how science, metaphor, and imagination can create new forms of resilience, witness, and hope.

Transcript

[Lulu Miller]

WNYC Studios is supported by Bilt. Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, BILT makes it more worthwhile. By paying rent through Bilt, you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points, get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios, and enjoy exclusive experiences just for BILT members. Every month, earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to joinbilt.com WNYC that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com WNYC.

[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

[Lulu Miller]

WNYC Studios is supported by Apple TV.

[Becky Milligan]

It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes. Their boat is hit by killer whales and its sink sinks in seconds. All they have left is a life raft and each other. This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan. Listen to Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

[Qasem Walid]

Wait, you're listening.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Basetkari]

All right.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay.

[Qasem Walid]

All right.

[Lulu Miller]

You're listening to Radiolab from wnyc. I guess where I really want to begin is actually just because so much of this is about reality and different realities and inquiring about realities, I wonder where you stand on the many worlds interpretation, this idea of many worlds, parallel universes. What do you think about that?

[Qasem Walid]

I think it's very interesting because for a person who lives this madness in Gaza, imagining that there is another world, another peaceful world that is away from all this madness, away from all this horror, where I have another version of me living peacefully, just living alive is very intriguing, but scientifically speaking, I don't actually believe in it so much.

[Latif Nasser]

You don't?

[Qasem Walid]

Okay, yeah, I don't believe in it.

[Lulu Miller]

This is qassem Walid, a 28 year old physicist who has lived his whole life in Gaza. And over the last couple of years as Israel has dropped bombs all around him, as he's lost friends and family. Like many Palestinians, he's Been posting videos and essays, trying to show the world what's really going on. Only he has been doing it using quantum physics, and I wanted to understand why. So I called him up and we talked many times over five months as more and more groups, including the un, declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, as ceasefires were culled and then broken. And he told me the tale of how quantum physics entered his life, how it has helped him to survive the unthinkable chaos, and how that unthinkable chaos granted him access to perceive that confusing quantum state at the bottom of our physical world. If that makes no sense, I promise it will when Qasem explains it. So I'm going to pick up with our very first conversation, which we had back in July of 2025, when Israel's restrictions on aid had created mass starvation all around him. In G. I wonder if you can just start by describing your reality right now.

[Qasem Walid]

Okay, so today is July 29th, Tuesday, and right now it's 6:16 Gaza time. I live actually in Khan Yunis, which is in the south of Gaza, Gaza Strip. I'm actually in a cafe, which is in Al Mawasi area. Just a few people are here, but if I move outside, there would be like a zillion people because I'm right next to the tent camp.

[Lulu Miller]

When is the last time you ate? I know you had to cancel last week because you wrote that you'd spent three days looking for flour and hadn't found anything.

[Qasem Walid]

I think four days or three days ago, I was actually going to the Morag Crossing and unfortunately I couldn't take anything because there was like a zillion people. It was so packed and we were being shot at and I was just taking the floor, taking a shelter, and there is no shelter. It's just open land. You know, I'm sorry to say that, but the only shelter you can take is the guy in front of you. And luckily we got like some help from relatives and from friends to k lose flower. Can't survive on them for. For the last two or three days.

[Lulu Miller]

What is. What is that sound that I hear? Is that a plane?

[Qasem Walid]

Yeah, this is actually a warplane. I think it's F16 or something. We hear this on a daily basis and we actually can't right now tell which kind of a bomb is going to hit the ground, if it's going to be a drone, if it's going to be a quadcopter.

[Lulu Miller]

Are you less safe by being here right now talking to me? Is this a risk?

[Qasem Walid]

Well, you know, living in Gaza is a risk. Every place here, whenever I go out from my tent, I pray for myself. Whenever I entered any place, I pray for myself, for my safety, for my family's safety, for everyone's safety. Just a couple of days ago, actually, they bumped the collet right behind me just about like 30 or 40 meters. But, you know, I don't have another choice because I don't have access to the Internet. So I have to go to cafes to get a better access to the Internet. Okay. Not very good, actually, but, you know, this is what I've got in here. So. Yes.

[Lulu Miller]

So from the noise of that cafe, Qasem told me where his story with quantum physics began.

[Qasem Walid]

Funny enough, the first time I really got intrigued by physics, it was due to the stars. I don't want to say I was a romantic kid, but I was spending a lot of time on the rooftop just looking at the stars and denied the sky. You know, Gaza isn't the best place that you can view or observe the night sky from because we have, I think, more than 90% air pollution because of the density and the, you know, bomb makes from time to time. But I remember I was in the eighth grade, I was 14 years old. I remember at what night it was. There was a heavy rain. I think it was around midnight that when the rain had stopped, I decided to go to the rooftop just to look at the stars. And the scene was absolutely magnificent. Lulu. I still remember the scene. It looked like pearls. Pearls, yeah, exactly, pearls. But that night, I believe that some angel just sweeped up the whole sky and the view was like full hd. The first thing that my eyes light on was the three dots in the sky, which later on I found the name of them, which is called the Orion Belt.

[Lulu Miller]

And Qasem would wonder about those twinkling pearls in the sky, what they are.

[Basetkari]

Made of, why they are pulsing. When you look at the stars, they have this pulsing light on and off. If this was some sort of a language or something, like.

[Lulu Miller]

Like a Morse code.

[Qasem Walid]

Exactly.

[Lulu Miller]

And there was someone in his life he could take these questions to.

[Qasem Walid]

My father, who was a genius engineer. He worked actually as the manager of the engineering unit of the Palestine Broadcasting Channel. My father was very generous man. He actually gave a lot of free lectures to my neighbors and my relatives in mathematics and physics. And from time to time, I was intrigued by the stuff he was saying and lecturing about. So I sit from time to time. Not every time, I'm not a geek or something, but, you know, okay, I Don't know, man.

[Lulu Miller]

You're writing about quantum mechanics like all the time. Are you sure you're not a geek?

[Qasem Walid]

No, I can't assure you I'm not a geek. But yeah, I was intrigued. It was out of curiosity. I wanted to listen to what he was saying, and I had to slide in between the students he had and to sit around and listen to what he said. And it was very beautiful. You know, he would romanticize even, you know, engineering, physics and stuff. He would compare like the electric current for love or something between male and female and between spouses and stuff. He was a romantic guy, yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

Qasem says he thinks his dad wanted to be a poet.

[Qasem Walid]

But, you know, being a poet or a writer wasn't something like a play. My mother's uncle used to write poems and insulting the Israeli occupation. And he was locked up in jails for months. And I don't think my father wanted to be in jail for something. So he was like writing diaries and stuff and keeping it for himself, not publishing it.

[Lulu Miller]

Qasem's father died in 2016 when Qasem was 19 years old.

[Qasem Walid]

Maybe in another universe where my dad is alive, I could be like, still learning from him. But in my world, I believe my father said to me so many times that if he want to choose a field to major on, he would choose physics. He was a brilliant engineer, but he was so interested in physics. That's how he actually inspired me to continue with the physics field.

[Lulu Miller]

Did you see it as honoring him like living the life he didn't get to do, but you wanted to, to have access to those ideas and those classes?

[Qasem Walid]

I believe my father won't let me to be his second chance. Because my father was very strict that I am my own story, you know, that's beautiful. Everyone had his story from this life. He had his story with all the difficulties he had from the poverty that he actually took his family from. And he want me to decide what I want.

[Lulu Miller]

And what he wanted was to study physics. So he did at the Islamic University of Gaza.

[Qasem Walid]

I don't know, it was the most beautiful place in the whole Gaza Strip. The campus was like a painting. It was all tree covered with trees, big trees. And maybe my best place and my favorite place in the university was the library. Because, you know, the library has this panoramic window where you can see different sides of the campus. You can see the whole university from there. You can see the students interacting with each other. You can see professors and students circling around each other because, you know, there's many lectures actually happening outdoors. And you can see, like, casually a professor would take a punch of the student and sit under a tree to teach them about something. It was a perfect scene for a student. It was the perfect place for a besieged student that is trapped in Gaza to study in because you can't feel the freedom there. And that's when I stumbled into quantum mechanics.

[Lulu Miller]

He took a few classes his first years, but it was his junior year that he met the guy who would change the course of his life. Dr. Sufyan Taya, a renowned physics professor and president of the whole university. What did Dr. Taya look like?

[Qasem Walid]

Okay, he was a catch, if I can say that.

[Lulu Miller]

A catch.

[Qasem Walid]

He was a catch. He was the most elegant person I have ever seen. You know, his suits were so, like, tied up and clean. And the way he actually do his hair.

[Lulu Miller]

How did he do his hair?

[Qasem Walid]

He actually flipped it over, like to the back, you know, and he has this silver hair all around his head. And he was so, like, elegant, you know. We don't have this type of professors much in Gaza. You just have the shirt and the bands and some sort of shoes. But he was so dressed up every day, so elegant, so polite, you know, he would never raise his voice. He was like, I don't know, like a walking book that smells nice, you know? Do you know?

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Qasem Walid]

Do you know these old books we have, and they smell unique. He was like. Like that. He was an old book that smells nice.

[Lulu Miller]

And this old book that smells nice. He opened the door to the quantum realm, this place where the particles that build our world, that build each and every one of us and every tree and every wall and every bomb and every moon are in this maddening, shifty state called superposition, where they are impossible to pin down. They are not in any one concrete place, but they are also not quite in multiple places at once. But they are also definitely not nowhere.

[Qasem Walid]

I know this is a little messed up.

[Lulu Miller]

It's really messed up. But Dr. Taya explained that's just how it goes and you can't fight it. And to add just one more messed up layer to this whole superposition state, particles are only in it when you're not looking. As soon as you look at a particle, when you measure, collapses out of superposition back down into one thing or the other.

[Qasem Walid]

What Richard Feynman, which is in my perspective, is the. The most brilliant physicist, like, ever been like, he's the goat of physics. He's the goat. Yeah, yeah. He was like, so puzzled by it, and he said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't really understand it.

[Lulu Miller]

The point isn't to understand it, it's just to accept it that the math and all the fancy experiments say that superposition is a fact of life. And Dr. Taya explained that this creates all these wild effects.

[Qasem Walid]

Maybe one of the stories I remember when he talked about an experiment where the physicists collide two protons together near the spot speed of light, and from the debris of the collision of the two protons, two photons have emerged, which was super weird. It's like crashing two cars. And a bicycle came out from this collision. You know, it was so bizarre.

[Lulu Miller]

And sitting in Dr. Taya's classroom, Qasem was hooked.

[Qasem Walid]

He was so subtle, so, so poetic, if I can say that. He was like, you know, he can, like, projectize the physics concepts into life.

[Lulu Miller]

If you had to pin, like, one thing that really grabbed you, which one would it be?

[Qasem Walid]

Like a quantum tunneling. It's like, you know, with a quantum tunneling.

[Lulu Miller]

Hassam explained to me that quantum tunneling is this real thing that happens when electrons can just tunnel through a barrier that it doesn't seem like they should be able to. Almost like teleportation.

[Becky Milligan]

Whoa.

[Qasem Walid]

So what Dr. Taya was trying to establish there is that we can make our own version of tunneling. Because here we are living our life here in Gaza as besieged people, besieged civilians. Like, if I want to move from Gaza to Egypt, I can't. Why? Because there is a crossings or borders that Israel has said it can't break through that barrier. But we are also created from subatomic particles. So how about to imagine ourselves as electrons and go to the moon? Yeah, we're talking here emotionally, spiritually, not an actual sense. Then why not Looking up and looking up to the sky, looking up to the one beautiful thing that is available to us for free, you know, because nothing is free in Gaza.

[Lulu Miller]

And so Qasem began tunneling deeper and deeper into the quantum world, where he began to see a future for his life as a physicist. What, what did you start to, like, what did you want to find out? Or what did you start to sort of imagine your life as a physicist could look like?

[Qasem Walid]

I think it would, like, go for a scholarship. It would be most likely France, the UK or the us I'm more into astrophysics.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, really?

[Qasem Walid]

I wanted to visit NASA, SpaceX, to see the rockets, the Falcon and stuff, to have this involvement with it, to capture it from my naked eye, not just from the screen of my Laptop or my mobile. It would be quite something, actually. And this is a life I imagine myself.

[Lulu Miller]

So you. Okay, so you had these dreams of maybe like getting a scholarship and becoming an astrophysicist and maybe going to NASA and looking through this telescope with your naked eye and seeing stars in huge detail. And then for you, when did you know that was changing or that that possibility was eclipsing for the moment?

[Qasem Walid]

Oh, my God. What?

[Lulu Miller]

Are you okay?

[Qasem Walid]

No, no, no.

[Latif Nasser]

The.

[Qasem Walid]

I don't know if you hear. Yeah, they stated the generator all over again.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah, yeah, I hear it.

[Qasem Walid]

This is really interesting question. I really. I wanted to answer, but I don't know if you can hear my voice. Okay, nearly. And I'm actually running out of battery. My battery is at 22%.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, so maybe.

[Qasem Walid]

What?

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, so.

[Qasem Walid]

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Not at all. I am really having fun.

[Becky Milligan]

Me too.

[Qasem Walid]

I am having really great time with you.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Qasem Walid]

I. I really don't want this to end.

[Lulu Miller]

Could we do. I don't know, could we do one more someday this week? Or is it too dangerous for you?

[Qasem Walid]

Not genders. I think everybody, you know the situation. But I don't know, I don't think it would be dangerous. We can. We can do it tomorrow if you want.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah, I would love to do it. Can we do it tomorrow? Can we do it tomorrow? Of course.

[Qasem Walid]

Okay. Yeah, of course. Tomorrow. Same time.

[Becky Milligan]

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[Latif Nasser]

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[Lulu Miller]

October 7, 2023 Shortly after sunrise at.

[Qasem Walid]

First, I'll be honest with you, I thought that was thunder. You know, sometimes we get some thunders in autumns in Gaza and drizzles. You know, from Time to time in autumn. So I thought at first that's a thunders sound, but then I went out to see what's going on and I saw like countless rockets launching every single area from Gaza is actually has these stripes of the smokes that the rocket left behind.

[Lulu Miller]

This was of course the Hamas attack that would kill over a thousand Israelis and within hours Israel would begin its counterattack, which at the time of this recording has killed over 69,000 Palestinians.

[Qasem Walid]

You can ask every Palestinian in Gaza and would tell you that from October 7th we knew that something unprecedented is coming and something we have never lived before, even our ancestors.

[Lulu Miller]

Just days later, Israeli jets fly toward his university.

[Qasem Walid]

All I see is was a nipping of rubble, ash and dust. A thick nebula that covered the whole camps. It was nothing that I have seen before.

[Lulu Miller]

Two months later, Israeli tanks push into his neighborhood.

[Qasem Walid]

We were in the middle of the streets when the bombshell started to fall upon our heads. The resonance, the sound of it, the high pitched sound of the bombshell is still bouncing on and off between the walls of my, of my skull. You know, I still remember the sound. It was really, really loud.

[Lulu Miller]

Did you think you were gonna die that day? I mean, did you think that was it?

[Qasem Walid]

I think yes, because the nearest bomb was actually 20 meters or 30 meters away from me. And I was like just startled and just stopped and just waiting for my fate, my destiny. Until my mother, who came there to be braver than I, than I did really, I swear she pulled me from my back of the chair, the back of the shed and just aggressively pulled me towards the wall. It's the mother instinct, you know. Yeah, I can't remember much actually because it was all, all happening fast. You know, we just once we saw people going south, we just followed the crowd and people were like walking towards Rafah because it's the southern Gaza. They were walking like drunks swaying, like staggering like drunks, you know.

[Lulu Miller]

What was that sway, do you think?

[Qasem Walid]

Do you know the Bendolian movement? Yeah, Pendulum, exactly. They were swaying like they didn't have the energy to walk. So they were swaying because they didn't know where to go. They didn't know where the road would end, they didn't know where their feet will land.

[Lulu Miller]

Qasem and his family joined that procession of people flowing south.

[Qasem Walid]

I actually hold under my arm one mattress, My brother hold the other. My other brothers were holding, you know, clothes and other luggage and we took it on foot. It took us actually more than three hours that day to reach to the point where we Saw old people just sitting on the ground, didn't know what to do. Others were starting to build, like, makeshift tents and stuff. And I have never built a tent before. So it was the time for me to move into a new world, a new world of tents. And, yeah, it's my world now, which I've been living in since that day.

[Lulu Miller]

At some point in all the chaos, Qasem finds some Internet, checks his phone, and sees a picture of Dr. Taya. Brown eyes, warm silver hair, flipped back.

[Qasem Walid]

I saw this post, you know, honoring Dukhoutaya and announced his killing. His hair was bumped by an Israeli airstrike.

[Basetkari]

Wow.

[Qasem Walid]

When Israel issued the massive displacement orders, the majority of people there took refuge in the southern Gaza. And Dr. Sufian Terya, amazingly. And I don't know what was going on with him, but he decided to go even further in the north because I believe his family home is located in there. And he took refuge in there. I don't know if took refuge is the right choice of word, but that is where he was killed. Yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

When you heard that news, what did you feel? What did you think?

[Qasem Walid]

I don't know. I stopped there, like for one minute or two. I don't, like, express myself more, like loudly or something. I keep it to myself. So I just stopped and like, holding my phone and just stopped looking at the post at the time, and I couldn't believe it, you know.

[Lulu Miller]

Then a month later, the Israeli government prevents Qasem's Aunt Samar from traveling to Egypt for medical treatment, and she dies. And all the while, in the Outside World, the UN's International Court of Justice is convening and deciding not to call what's happening inside a genocide. And the US is continuing to send billions of dollars in bombs and other military aid to Israel. And in the spring of 2024, Qasem hits a kind of breaking point. Despite being a pretty private person, he begins publishing pieces describing his reality.

[Qasem Walid]

To speak up, to speak loud, and to scream at the wall to take action.

[Lulu Miller]

He started with a poem about his aunt.

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

I miss you. I miss spending time with you. The memories keep buzzing above your couch.

[Lulu Miller]

Then he wrote an elegy to Dr. Taya.

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

Life feels different now that Israel has killed my professor. Knowledge feels a trap. Behind unopenable gates.

[Lulu Miller]

He wrote about bombed pharmacies and schools and life in a tent camp.

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

Fires burn and checked garbage piles rot in the sun.

[Lulu Miller]

And in nearly every essay, as he describes his surroundings in excruciating details, at some point, he casts his light on.

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

The quantum world Recently I have noticed that my movement is similar to the quantum harmonic oscillator qho. In the qho, electrons can also use a kind of stirs. It's called the ladder operator. And it's how electrons move between energy states. When I imagine myself as an electronic, it is not the stairs I'm climbing that are the creation of beretu. It is the water, because it creates the ability to move from a lower energy state to a higher energy state, from being more thirsty to less thirsty.

[Lulu Miller]

I mean, there's all this stuff that you write about so beautifully, but it is. Quantum is so hard to understand. And like, I see you posed with this frustrating circumstance that you are in hell. And it seems like a lot of people, much of the outside world doesn't care and isn't seeing it and isn't acting. And so you're trying to scream out by describing reality. But then you're using these quantum terms which are so hard. Do you worry that like, that could confuse it or confuse people? Or have you ever found it fall short? I guess I just still wonder about the choice to bring in all the quantum stuff, which is hard to understand.

[Qasem Walid]

Well, I come from a scientific background. I'm studying physics. I studied physics. And you know, when you study something, you just live by it and you see everything from its perspective. If you are a writer, you would see like people like stories or like poems. If you are a doctor, you would see people like, I don't know, like cases or something. If you're an engineer, you start picturing people like machines or something. So that's me, a physicist, a student of physics, trying to live a genocide. And my haven, my only haven that I can take refuge in is the world of physics. Because when you love a place, when you live in a place that you love, you feel comfortable, you feel like you own it, and you feel like you can be out of reach. Like a whole universe that is just built for you. And surprisingly, you built it for yourself. I'm actually building this place on a daily basis, even inside my head. And I'm not talking here physically, basically, it's actually, it's all in my head. But if I can escape inside my head and if I can escape to the inside the bosses and the maze of physics and quantum physics and this like seemingly arbitrary and randomness of physics, well, so be it. I can. If they can offer me a safer place, if they can offer me a refuge, if they can offer me some comfort, then I'm lucky, I think, to have this while Two other millions in Gaza suffering in a daily basis. And I'm not saying that I'm not suffering, but I'm at least using something that I love as a safe zone. If I can say that.

[Lulu Miller]

In May of 2024, Israel invades Rafah, which is now lies in.

[Qasem Walid]

Not in rubble, lies in sand.

[Lulu Miller]

You're saying it's beyond rubble?

[Qasem Walid]

Exactly. It's beyond rubble right now. It's become a desert.

[Lulu Miller]

In July, one of his best friends is killed in an airstrike.

[Qasem Walid]

Israel can come for the houses, they come for the hospitals, they come for the streets and for the schools. But I was, like, thinking, can they reach an atom? Like, if I was living inside an atom, if I'm picturing myself like an electric, that would be like my safe haven, my safe refuge, where Israel or the Israeli army can reach me.

[Lulu Miller]

And In December of 2024, he realizes.

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

Something like Schuldinger's famous cat. I'm trapped in a box. I have been stuck in this box since the beginning of Israel's genocidal war in my homeland, Gaza. So many people know I'm inside it, but none can tell if I'm alive or dead.

[Lulu Miller]

He writes about this realization in an essay using one of the most famous and maddening quantum thought puzzles called Schrodinger's Cat. I'm going to cliffsnote it just so we can get back to Qasem's writing. But basically, Schrodinger's Cat is a imaginary experiment that this Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger dreamed up as a way of thinking about superposition, that shifty, annoying state that all subatomic particles are in when we're not measuring them. So it goes like, there is a cat in a box with a radioactive atom that could decay and kill it or not. But you can't know whether the cat is dead or alive until you open the box. And since the fate of the cat is tied to the atom, which is itself in a superposition of being decayed and not decayed, does that mean that the cat, before we open the box, is both alive and dead? And scientists love to fight about this. Schrodinger actually posed the whole thought puzzle as a kind of snub at quantum physics, saying, like, okay, there's no way that a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time. So we are misinterpreting what the math is saying about reality. But other scientists say, no, you know, I think maybe the cat is both dead and alive. So back to Qasem's essay Like a.

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

Schrodinger's cat, I'm locked in a box that will eventually kill me. Luckily, I'm not dead yet. But am I alive? I'm writing this, surely, but I can't leave the box. The only outcome available to me is death. So I am afraid I can't say that I'm alive either. Seemingly, my existence has now become identified by the superposition of the states of being simultaneously alive and dead. I'm alive in a lifeless life, and all the possible paths ahead lead to my death.

[Lulu Miller]

Is what you're saying. Like you're trying to picture not the moment of collapsing when the human measurement is involved, but what's going on in that box the whole time.

[Qasem Walid]

Exactly, exactly. Because I'm living it. You know, I'm living it. So the whole point of it is, is that I feel sorry for that cat. I'm not talking here about the physicist in me. I'm talking about the human, about the Palestinian who's stuck in Gaza not only for two years, because this is misleading. I'm stuck in Gaza for 20 years. I have been locked into this box for two decades, or I can say for, I don't know, like seven decades. I don't know how to describe it. I was satisfied. I was content with the box I used to have before this work. You know, we were like, so, I don't know, adjusted to it. It wasn't perfect, but we adjusted to it. We know the schedules of electricity, we know the schedules of water. We know the schedules of everything. Actually, we adjusted to it. We cope with the life. We just like, you know, life goes on and we have to go with it. But right now it's taking place in an ever shrinking box. So I'm sympathizing with the cat. I'm empathizing with the cat, because the cat is me and I am the cat.

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

Everything in life seems to follow a certain binary system, from electrons, which spin in one direction or the other, to human beings, which can be either alive or dead. Still, this doesn't seem to apply to me because whether I'm living or dead at any given moment is unknown. I'm no longer part of this binary of life and being, it seems. So what am I?

[Lulu Miller]

It's like you're saying you are experiencing superposition, this duality, that superposition concept is something that, again, the brightest minds in science can't quite fathom. They just say, just accept it. Like we can't even. You can't imagine it. But you're also saying you are Physically living superposition. So report back from superposition. What does it feel like to be so many states at once?

[Qasem Walid]

It feels like if, God forbid, someone had pointed a gun to your head, like you're walking to your life with someone, like walking behind you with a gun biting to the back of your head. So, yeah, that's what it feels like. It's horror. It's a horror. We are horrified on a daily basis. If I go to grab food for my family, I'll be dead. If I went to the sea to catch some fish, an Israeli boat can target me. If I went back to my house to grab some wood, an Israeli drone might catch kill me. If I went to the market, I might be hit. If I went to. If I was in the car, I might be hit. If I went anywhere in Gaza, I might be. Be hit and targeted and killed. So, yeah, it's. I don't know. I can't describe it actually. I'm so sorry. It's. It's. It's insane, you know, it's insane. No one can live like this. Before the war, I was trying to see how we can get knowledge about certain dilemma or certain problem in the physics world or mathematics or any other field of science. But right now I want to show the world the reality as is, you know, the reality as it is to show them. Like here, look. This is the reality of Gaza. And you the one who need to investigate this time. Do you feel that the shift in.

[Lulu Miller]

Here, it's like you went from scientist to object of study.

[Qasem Walid]

Exactly. Exactly. I am the one who is inside the box. I am the one who is trapped. I am the one who is stuck and can't. I'm out of reach and out of resources and I'm out of knowledge and I'm out of everything that could help me to climb the ladder to open the box. It is not up to me. I tried, I failed. And it's your turn right now.

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

In Schrodinger's cat experiment, everyone asked whether the cat was alive or dead, but none actually opened the box to see. If they had, the superposition would have collapsed and the cat would only be dead if they didn't open the box in time. We're not cats. Please open the box.

[Basetkari]

Is.

[Qasem Walid]

Is my sound cutting off or anything? Is it?

[Lulu Miller]

No, you. You sound great. Can you hear me okay?

[Qasem Walid (reading his essays)]

Yes.

[Lulu Miller]

So we're recording this. It's October 16, 2025, six days after the ceasefire officially went into effect. And I guess, like, with the news of the ceasefire spreading, how has the box changed for you in the last week.

[Basetkari]

It's the same box, but it gets only quieter. But it doesn't change that. I'm still trapped inside this box. Like from my own point of view, when I hear the ceasefire announcement, I thought 1. The first question that bubbed into my mind was, what is my options right now? I don't have a house, I don't have a job. I don't have a life. I don't even have a clothes to protect myself from winter. I actually tried to sneak out to my neighborhood a couple of days ago to save some clothes, winter clothes, and some boxes from underneath the rubble. And I went with the first light of the morning because, you know, we take the whole distance between Al Mawasir to Eastern Khan Yunus on foot and we were shot at by a quadcopter.

[Lulu Miller]

Really?

[Qasem Walid]

Israeli drone.

[Basetkari]

Yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

And this was after the official ceasefire?

[Basetkari]

Yes, that was a day after. It was actually at the last Tuesday. So we're not going back to my house until further notice from the Israeli army because it's a bit dangerous in there.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Basetkari]

The ceasefire doesn't mean the genocide has stopped. It just transformed to other shapes, other forms of it. And the only difference is just the rate of killing the civilians in Gaza because, you know, the rate of killing is decreasing. But it is the same tactics, it's the same reality. Yeah, yeah. We're trapped more than ever right now. And I don't think it will change anytime soon. I don't just want to be exist, like inside this box. I do want to live. We always want something that is beyond our physical or something metaphysical, something imaginative, something that can give us a reason.

[Lulu Miller]

Shortly after you said this, the call dropped. Oh, I think I lost you.

[Basetkari]

Hi again. I'm so sorry.

[Lulu Miller]

Hi.

[Basetkari]

The Internet, as usual.

[Lulu Miller]

No, no, not at all. I was gonna say, how's the electricity grid? How's the Internet? Is that still.

[Basetkari]

Well, you know, the sun is going down actually, and so it's getting like slower and slower by battery.

[Lulu Miller]

Is it like every night you can't escape? You can't. You get cut off from the world.

[Basetkari]

Yeah. Because at night we don't have electricity anymore because it's all powered by the sun. But you know, actually there is nothing more beautiful than the stars. Especially like you don't have electricity at all because that is when you can see stars. All clear. My first ever question about fuzz is why there are pulsing, you know? Yeah, I learned about it like many years later, why the pulsing happens. It was always because of the, our atmosphere because of how the, the wind changes its direction through the layers of our atmosphere. It had nothing to do with the nature of the star itself.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, interesting.

[Basetkari]

The more I, I learn about them, you know, it's always like, it's not a toxic relationship. It's always like when I know.

[Latif Nasser]

Because.

[Basetkari]

You know, when, when in relationship, when you know more about your partner, you, you start having some sort of a problem. But this is the.

[Lulu Miller]

It happens. You're so right. I mean, sometimes knowledge can extinguish magic.

[Basetkari]

Exactly.

[Qasem Walid]

It's not the same with the stars.

[Basetkari]

Because the more I know about them, the more I fell in love with them. You know, me with the stars. It's more of a feeling, an everlasting good feeling that it actually makes me feel good even about myself.

[Lulu Miller]

Can you see any stars right now?

[Basetkari]

I can walk outside. Just give me a second.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Basetkari]

So I'm actually stepping outside right now, but I can't recognize any buttons, unfortunately. But I know for sure that the Orion belt would be on the southern side of the, of the sky right now. But you can't, you can't see them, you know? Yeah. Because Gaza with the. This war alone produced more greenhouse gases. I'm trying really hard. I'm so sorry, but I can't recognize any. But it seems like foggy.

[Qasem Walid]

Yeah.

[Basetkari]

Up.

[Lulu Miller]

This episode was produced by Jessica Young. It was edited by Alex Deason. Fact checking by Emily Krieger. One little update as we were getting this ready. The Nobel Prize in Physics was announced for 2025 and it went to scientists for their work on quantum tunneling. They had done experiments which took it from the quantum world to the classical world to our world, meaning not just tiny particles, but big groups of particles can tunnel, can make it through barriers that it doesn't seem like they should be able to. We had a ton of editorial support on this one. So big thanks to everyone who weighed in. Katja Rogers, Sara Khari, Karim Khattan, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, and Allen Adams. Also, if you'd like to read Qasem's whole essay, it's called I Am Stuck in a Box Like Schrodinger's in Gaza. And it was published on Al Jazeera December 19, 2024. There are also links to more of his work in the show notes here. And finally, if you just have not had enough quantum physics for your day, our producer Jessica Young had a wonderful conversation with the physicist Alan Adams at MIT to sort of help us understand our quantum physics as best we could. It's really great. It goes into how there's like actually quantum stuff going on in our bodies, in our proteins, and you can listen to that if you become a member of the lab, which is the way that you can support Radiolab by heading on over to Radiolab.org join many, many thanks for listening. Catch you next week.

[Basetkari]

Hi, I'm Basetkari and I'm from Somerset, New Jersey, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our Executive editor, Sarah Sandbach is our Executive director, and our Managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhun, Nia Sembendham, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Anissa Vitse, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol, Mazini, and Natalie Middleton.

[Lulu Miller]

Hi, I'm Maddie and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radiolab Science programming is provided by the Simmons foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred Peace Loan Foundation.

[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is supported by Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that Radiolab is his favorite podcast too. Oh, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com bank Capital One NA member FDIC Radiolab is supported by the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit transforming America's love of nature into action for our forests. Did you know that national forests provide clean drinking water to 1 in 3Americans? And when forests struggle, so do we. The National Forest foundation creates lasting impact by restoring forests and watersheds, strengthening wildfire resilience, and expanding recreation access for all. Last year they planted 5.3 million trees and led over 300 projects to protect nature and communities nationwide. Learn [e-mail] Radiolabs.