Quantum Refuge

Qasem Waleed is a 28-year-old physicist who has lived in Gaza his whole life. In 2024, he joined a chorus of Palestinians sharing videos and pictures and writing about the chaos and violence they were living through, as Israel’s military bombardment devastated their lives. But Qasem was trying to describe his reality through the lens of the most notoriously confusing and inscrutable field of science ever, quantum mechanics. We talked to him, from a cafe near the Al-Mawasi section of Gaza, to find out why. And over the course of several conversations, he told us how this reality-breaking corner of science has helped him survive. And how such unspeakable violence actually let him understand, in a visceral way, quantum mechanics’ most counter-intuitive ideas. Special thanks to Katya Rogers, Karim Kattan, Allan Adams, Sarah Qari, Soren Wheeler, and Pat WaltersEPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Lulu MillerProduced by - Jessica Yungwith mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Emily Kreigerand Edited by - Alex Neason EPISODE CITATIONS: Videos - A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics with Sean Carroll, The Royal Institution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hVmeOCJjOU) Introduction to Superposition, with MIT’s Allan Adams (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3bPUKo5zc) The Quantum Wavefunction, Explained (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOI4DlWQ_1w) Articles - Read a selection of Qasem’s published essays about his life in Gaza and the quantum world: I am stuck in a box like Schrodinger’s in Gaza (https://zpr.io/ALDVi9E5bRt8) Israel has turned Gaza’s summer into a weapon (https://zpr.io/YS4WK4hVQC5T) The Physics of Death in Gaza (https://zpr.io/hxsgxicVqPAd) Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Wait, you're listening?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  All right. Okay. All right.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Radiolab.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  From...

• 0:12Speaker 00

  WNYC. See? Yep.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  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?

• 0:49Speaker 03

  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 a life, is very intriguing. But scientifically speaking, I don't actually believe in it so much.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  You don't? Okay.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't believe in it.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  This is Kasam 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.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  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 called and then broken.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  If that makes no sense, I promise it will when Kasim 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 Gaza.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  I wonder if you can just start by describing your reality right now.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  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. If I move outside, there will be like a zillion people because I'm right next to the tent camp.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  I think four days or three days ago, I was actually going to the Morag crossing. 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 kill those with flour. Can't survive on them for the last two or three days.

• 4:06Speaker 02

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

• 4:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is actually a warplane. I think it's a F-16 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 copter.

• 4:28Speaker 02

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

• 4:35Speaker 03

  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 enter 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 bombed the college right behind me, just about like 30 or 40 meters. So, 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. Which is not very good, actually, but you know, this is what I've got in here, so, yes.

• 5:14Speaker 02

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

• 5:20Speaker 03

  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 the night 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 8th grade, I was 14 years old.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  I remember at one 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.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  It looked like pearls.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Pearls?

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, pearls. But that night, I believe that some angel just swept up the whole sky and the view was like full HD.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  The first thing that my eyes was lied on was the three dots in the sky, which later on I found the name of them, which is called the Orion Belt.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  And Kasim would wonder about those twinkling pearls in the sky.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  What they are made of, why they are pulsing. You know, when you look at the stars, they have this pulsing light on and off.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  If this was some sort of a language or something.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Like a Morse code?

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 7:26Speaker 02

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

• 7:31Speaker 03

  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 a 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.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Okay, I don't know, man. You're writing about quantum mechanics like all the time. Are you sure you're not a geek?

• 8:08Speaker 03

  No, I can assure you I'm not a geek. But you know, I was intrigued. It was out of curiosity, I wanted to listen to what he was saying. And I had to like 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 a male and female and between spouses and stuff. He was a romantic guy, yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 02

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

• 8:43Speaker 03

  But, you know, being a poet or a writer wasn't something like plausible. My mother's uncle used to write poems 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.

• 9:08Speaker 02

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

• 9:13Speaker 03

  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 wanted 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.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  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?

• 9:44Speaker 03

  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?

• 9:51Speaker 02

  That's beautiful.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:05Speaker 02

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

• 10:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  You can see like casually a professor would take a bunch of the students and sit under a tree to teach them about something.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Because you can feel the freedom there.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  And that's when I stumbled into quantum mechanics.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  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?

• 11:43Speaker 03

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

• 11:45Speaker 02

  A catch?

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. He was a catch. He was the most elegant person I have ever seen, you know? His suit was so tied up and clean and the way he actually do his hair.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  How did he do his hair?

• 12:02Speaker 03

  He actually flip it over, like to the back, you know? And he has this silver hair all around his head. And he was so elegant, you know? We don't have this type of professors much in Gaza. You just have the shirt and the pants 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 that? Yeah. Do you know these old books we have? And they smell unique? He was like, he was an old book that smells nice.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  I know this is a little messed up.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  It's really messed up.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  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 it, it collapses out of superposition, back down into one thing or the other.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Richard Feynman, which is in my perspective, is the most brilliant physicist like ever been. Like, he's the goat of physics.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  He's the goat, yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  He was like so puzzled by it. And he said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't really understand it.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Maybe one of the stories I remember when he talked about an experiment where the physicists collide two protons together near the 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.

• 14:55Speaker 02

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

• 14:59Speaker 03

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

• 15:11Speaker 02

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

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Like a quantum tunneling? It's like, you know, you know what the quantum tunneling?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Kasim 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. Whoa.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  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 crossings or borders that Israel has set. I can't break through that barrier.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  But we are also created from subatomic particles. So how about to imagine ourselves as electrons and go to the moon?

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  And we're talking here emotionally, spiritually, not in actual sense. Then why not looking out 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.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  And so Kasim began tunneling, deeper and deeper into the quantum world, where he began to see a future for his life as a physicist.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  What?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  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?

• 17:12Speaker 03

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

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 17:24Speaker 03

  I also 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.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  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, and then for you, when did you know that was changing or that that possibility was eclipsing for the moment?

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  What? Are you okay?

• 18:15Speaker 03

  No, no, no, the, I don't know if you hear.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  They started the generator all over again.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Do you hear it?

• 18:23Speaker 02

  I hear it.

• 18:24Speaker 03

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

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Okay, so maybe what, okay, so.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  I'm so sorry.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  No, not at all.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  I'm so sorry.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  I really, I really, I'm really having fun.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  I'm having a really great time with you. Yeah. I needed, I'm on this train.

• 18:50Speaker 02

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

• 18:55Speaker 03

  No, it's not dangerous, I think. 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 would like.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  I would love to do it. Can we do tomorrow? Can we do tomorrow?

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. Tomorrow, same time.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?

• 19:24Speaker 06

  Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.

• 19:35Speaker 05

  Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  October 7, 2023, shortly after sunrise.

• 19:58Speaker 03

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

• 20:26Speaker 02

  This was, of course, the Hamas attack that would kill over 1,000 Israelis. And within hours, Israel would begin its counterattack, which, at the time of this recording, has killed over 69,000 Palestinians.

• 20:39Speaker 03

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

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Just days later, Israeli jets fly toward his university.

• 20:56Speaker 03

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

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Two months later, Israeli tanks push into his neighborhood.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  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 bit sound of the bombshell is still bouncing on and off between the walls of my skull, you know. I still remember that sound. It was really, really loud.

• 21:29Speaker 02

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

• 21:33Speaker 03

  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's ten, there to be braver than I, than I do.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Really?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I swear. She pulled me from my back of the shit, the back of the shit, and just aggressively pulled me towards the wall. It's the mother instinct, you know?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  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? They didn't know where to go.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  What was that sway, do you think?

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Do you know the pendulum movement?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, pendulum?

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Pendulum, exactly. They were swaying like they didn't have the energy to, 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.

• 22:46Speaker 02

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

• 22:50Speaker 03

  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 all people that 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, to move into a new world, a new world of tents. And yeah, it's, it's my world now, which I've been living in since that day.

• 23:30Speaker 02

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

• 23:41Speaker 03

  I saw this post, you know, honoring Dr. Taya and announced his killing. His house was, was bombed by an Israeli airstrike.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  When Israel issued the massive displacement orders, the majority of people there took refuge in the southern Gaza. And Dr. Sufjan Taya 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.

• 24:27Speaker 02

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

• 24:33Speaker 03

  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 like stopped and like holding my phone and just stopped looking at the post at the time. And I couldn't believe it, you know?

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Then, a month later, the Israeli government prevents Qassim'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, Qassim hits a kind of breaking point. Despite being a pretty private person, he begins publishing pieces describing his reality.

• 25:28Speaker 03

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

• 25:35Speaker 02

  He started with a poem about his aunt.

• 25:37Speaker 03

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

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Then he wrote an elegy to Dr. Taya.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Life feels different now that Israel has killed my professor. Knowledge feels trapped behind unopenable gates.

• 25:58Speaker 02

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

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Fires burn unchecked, garbage piles rot in the sun.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  And in nearly every essay, as he describes his surroundings in excruciating detail, at some point, he casts his light on the quantum world.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  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 electron, it is not the stirs I'm climbing that are the creation operator. 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.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  I mean, there's all this stuff that you write about so beautifully, but it is, it's quantum is so hard to understand. And like, 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

• 27:45Speaker 02

  stuff, which is, which is hard to understand.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  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, it's actually, it's all in my head. But if I can escape inside my head, if I can escape to the, inside the bathes and the maze of physics and quantum physics, and in this seemingly arbitrary and randomness of physics, well, so be it. If they can offer me a safer place, if they can offer me a refuge,

• 29:14Speaker 03

  if they can offer me some comfort, then I'm lucky, I think, to have this, while two other millions in Gaza suffering on 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.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  In May of 2024, Israel invades Rafa.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Which is now lies in, not in rubble, it lies in sand.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  You're saying it's beyond rubble?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Exactly, it's beyond rubble right now, it's become a desert.

• 29:48Speaker 02

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

• 29:53Speaker 03

  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 electron, is there would be like my safe haven, my safe refuge, where Israel or the Israeli army can reach me?

• 30:19Speaker 02

  And in December of 2024, he realizes something.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Like Schrodinger'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.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  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 Cliff's note it just so we can get back to Kossam's writing. But basically, Schrodinger's cat is an 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 this. 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

• 31:29Speaker 02

  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, OK, 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.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  So back to Kossam's essay.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Like Schrodinger's cat, I'm locked in a box that will eventually kill me. Luckily, I'm not dead, yet, but am I alive?

• 32:22Speaker 03

  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 superstition 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.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  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?

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Exactly. Because I'm living it, you know? I'm living it. So the whole point of it 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 in this box for two decades. Or I can't 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 war. 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.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  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?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  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, eh, 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?

• 35:12Speaker 03

  It feels like, 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 pointing 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. It's, 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 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.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  If I went anywhere in Gaza, I might be hit, untargeted, and killed. So, yeah, it's, I don't know, I can't describe it, actually. I'm so sorry. It's insane.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  No, you do.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  You know, it's insane. No one can live like this.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Before the war, I was trying to see how we can get a 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 are the one who need to investigate this time. Do you feel the shift in here?

• 36:42Speaker 02

  It's like you went from scientist to object of study.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  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 U-turn right now.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  In a Schrödinger'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.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  We're not cats. Please open the box.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Is my sound cutting off or anything?

• 39:00Speaker 02

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

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  So we're recording this, it's October 16th, 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?

• 39:24Speaker 03

  It's the same box, but it got only quieter.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  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 one, the first question that bopped 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.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  I actually tried to sneak out to my neighborhood a couple of days ago to save some clothes, winter clothes on some box from underneath the rubble. And I went with the first light of the morning because, you know, we take the whole distance between Al-Malath to Eastern Hanounis on foot. And we were shot at by a quadcopter.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Really?

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Israeli drone, yeah.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  And this was after the official ceasefire?

• 40:19Speaker 03

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

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Uh, the ceasefire doesn't mean the genocide has stopped. It just transformed to other shapes, other forms of it. And, um, 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 fact, it's the same reality, yeah. Um, 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, I, I do want to live.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  We always want something that is beyond our, uh, uh, that physical or something metaphysical, something imaginative, something that is can, can give us a reason.

• 41:23Speaker 02

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

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Hi again, I'm so sorry.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Internet as usual.

• 41:41Speaker 02

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

• 41:46Speaker 03

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

• 41:53Speaker 02

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

• 42:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  My first ever question about stars is why they are pulsing, you know?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  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, had nothing to do with the nature of the star itself.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 42:48Speaker 03

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

• 42:58Speaker 03

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

• 43:07Speaker 02

  It happens, you're so right. I would, I mean, sometimes knowledge can extinguish magic. It's true.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's not the same with the stars because the more I know about them, the more I fell in love with them, you know? Me with the stars is more of a feeling, an everlasting good feeling that it actually makes me feel, feel good even about myself.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Do you, can you see any stars right now?

• 43:36Speaker 03

  I can't walk outside. Just give me a second.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  So I'm actually sitting 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 sky right now.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  But you can't see them?

• 44:07Speaker 03

  But it's, you know, yeah, because Gaza, with the, this war alone produced more greenhouse gases. I'm trying really hard.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  I'm so sorry, but I can't recognize any buttons. It seems like foggy up there.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  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

• 46:27Speaker 02

  in. Kati Rogers, Sarah Kari, Karim Khaton, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, and Alan Adams. Also, if you'd like to read Kossam'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.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  It goes into how there's like actually quantum stuff going on in our bodies and 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.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Basit Kari, 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 Sandback 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 Blum, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niasambandham, Matt Keelty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Anissa Vitsa, Ariane Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.

• 48:26Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Maddie and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.