Radiolab - 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.

Duration: 51m
Broadcast on: 14 Nov 2025
Audio Format: other

Special thanks to Katya Rogers, Karim Kattan, Allan Adams, Sarah Qari, Soren Wheeler, and Pat Walters

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Lulu Miller
Produced by - Jessica Yung
with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Emily Krieger
and Edited by - Alex Neason

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Videos -

Articles -
Read a selection of Qasem’s published essays about his life in Gaza and the quantum world:

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.

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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 world's interpretation, this idea of many world's parallel universes. What do you think about that?"

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. It's very intriguing. But scientifically speaking, I don't actually believe in it so much. "You don't, okay?" "Yeah, I don't believe in it." This is Qasem 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 called 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 kind of fusing 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 Gaza. I wonder if you can just start by describing your reality right now. Okay, so today is July 29th, Tuesday, and right now it's 616 Gaza time. I live actually in Kuan Yunus, which is in the south of Gaza, Gaza Strip. Actually, in a cafe, which is in al-Mamasa 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. 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. I think four days or three days ago, I was actually going to the morag, of course thing, 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

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