Quantum Refuge

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Speaker 5 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 5 You're listening

Speaker 5 to Radio Lab. Lab.
Radio Lab. From

Speaker 2 WNYC.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I wonder where you stand on the many worlds interpretation, this idea of many worlds, parallel universes. What do you think about that?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But scientifically speaking, I don't actually believe in it so much.

Speaker 2 You don't, okay.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I don't believe in it.

Speaker 2 This is Qasam Walid. A 28-year-old physicist who has lived his whole life in Gaza.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Only he has been doing it using quantum physics.

Speaker 2 And I wanted to understand why.

Speaker 5 So I called him up.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If that makes no sense, I promise it will when Qasim explains it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I wonder if you can just start by describing your reality right now.

Speaker 5 Okay, so today is July 29th, Tuesday, and right now it's 6.16 Gaza time. I live actually in Khanyonis, which is in the south of Gaza, Gaza Strip.
I'm actually in a cafe, which is in Al-Mawasi area.

Speaker 5 Just a few people are here. But if I move outside, there will be like a zillion people because I'm right next to the tent camp.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 5 I think for 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I'm sorry to say that but the only shelter you can take is the guy in front of you.

Speaker 5 And luckily we got like some help from relatives and from friends to kill this flower can't survive on them for uh for the last two or three days

Speaker 2 what it what is that sound that i hear is that a plane

Speaker 5 exactly yeah it's this is actually a warplane i think it's a f-16 or something

Speaker 5 we hear this on a daily basis and we actually can't right now tell which kind of a pump is going to hit the ground if it's going to be a drone if it's going to be a helicopter

Speaker 2 Are you less safe by being here right now talking to me? Is this a risk?

Speaker 5 Well, you know, living in Gaza is a risk.

Speaker 5 Every place is here.

Speaker 5 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 safeties, for everyone's safeties.

Speaker 5 Just a couple of days ago, actually, they bombed the college right behind me, just about like 30 or 40 meters.

Speaker 5 So, but you know, I don't have another choice because uh

Speaker 5 i don't have access to the internet uh 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

Speaker 2 so from the noise of that cafe Qasim told me where his story with quantum physics began.

Speaker 5 Funny enough, the first time I really got intrigued by physics, it was due to the stars.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 base from time to time.

Speaker 5 But I remember I was in the eighth grade, I was 14 years old.

Speaker 5 I remember at what night it was, there was a heavy rain.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And the scene was absolutely magnificent. Lulu,

Speaker 5 I still remember the scene.

Speaker 5 It looked like pearls.

Speaker 5 Pearls? Yeah, exactly, pearls. But that night, I believe that

Speaker 5 some angel just sweeped up the whole sky, and the view was like full HD.

Speaker 5 The first thing that my eyes was light on was the three dots in the sky, which later on I found the name of them, which is called the Orion Build.

Speaker 5 And Qasim would wonder about those twinkling pearls in the sky. What they are made of, why they are pulsing.
You know, when you look at the stars, they have this pulsing light. I don't know

Speaker 5 if this was some sort of a language something

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 5 a Morse code? Exactly.

Speaker 2 And there was someone in his life he could take these questions to.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 said

Speaker 5 from time to time, not every time, I'm not a geek or something, but you know.

Speaker 5 Okay,

Speaker 2 I don't know, man, you're writing about quantum mechanics like all the time. Are you sure you're not a geek?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 He would romanticize even

Speaker 5 engineering, physics, and stuff. He would compare the electric current for love or something between a male and female and between spouses and stuff.
He was a romantic guy, yeah.

Speaker 2 Qasim says he thinks his dad wanted to be a poet.

Speaker 5 But you know, being a poet or a writer wasn't something like plausible. My mother's uncle used to write poems and insulting the Israeli Accubatian and he was locked up in jails for months.

Speaker 5 And I don't think my father wanted wanted to be in jail for something. So he was like writing diaries and stuff and keeping it for himself, not publishing it.

Speaker 2 Qasim's father died in 2016 when Qasim was 19 years old.

Speaker 5 Maybe in another universe where my dad is alive, I could be like still learning from him.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 He had his story with all the difficulties he had from the poverty that he actually took his family from and he wanted me to decide what I want.

Speaker 2 And what he wanted was to study physics. So he did at the Islamic University of Gaza.

Speaker 5 I don't know, it was the most beautiful place in the whole Gaza strip. The canvas was like a painting.

Speaker 5 It was all tree covered. with

Speaker 5 trees, big trees.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You can see the whole university from there. You can see the students interacting with each other.

Speaker 5 You can see professors and students circling around each other because you know there's many actions actually happening outdoors.

Speaker 5 You can see like casually a professor would take a bunch of the students and sit under a tree to teach him about something.

Speaker 5 It was a perfect scene for a student. It was the perfect place for a besieged student that is a trapped in Gaza to study in

Speaker 5 because you can feel the freedom there.

Speaker 5 Then that's when I stumbled into quantum mechanics.

Speaker 2 He took a few classes his first years, but but it was his junior year that he met the guy who would change the course of his life, Dr.

Speaker 2 Sufjan Taya, a renowned physics professor and president of the whole university. What did Dr.
Taya look like?

Speaker 5 Okay, he was a catch, if I can say that. A catch? Exactly.
He was a catch. He was the most elegant

Speaker 5 person I have ever seen, you know. His suits were so like tied up and clean, and the way he actually do his hair.
How did he do his hair?

Speaker 5 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 like elegant, you know. We don't have this type of professors much in Gaza.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 I don't don't know, like a walking book that smells nice. You know, do you know the, that, old? Yeah, that, do you know these old books we have and they smell unique?

Speaker 5 He was like, like that, he was an old book that smells nice.

Speaker 2 And this old book that smells nice, he opened the door to the quantum realm.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 5 I know this is a little messed up.

Speaker 5 It's really messed up.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 As soon as you look at a particle, when you measure it, it collapses out of superposition,

Speaker 2 back down

Speaker 2 into one thing or the other.

Speaker 5 What?

Speaker 5 Richard Feynman, which is, in my perspective, is the most brilliant physicist

Speaker 5 like ever been like he's the goat of physics and he would

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 2 the point isn't to understand it it's just to accept it that the math and all the fancy experiments say that superposition

Speaker 2 is a fact of life.

Speaker 2 And Dr. Taya explained that this creates all these wild effects.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 from the debris of the collision of the two protons, two photons have emerged, which was

Speaker 5 super weird.

Speaker 5 It's like crashing two cars and a bicycle came out from this collision. You know,

Speaker 5 it was so bizarre.

Speaker 2 And sitting in Dr. Taya's classroom, Qasem was hooked.

Speaker 5 He was so subtle, so boetic, if I can say that. He was like, you know, he can like projectize the physics concepts into life.

Speaker 2 If you had to pin like

Speaker 2 one thing that really grabbed you, which one would it be?

Speaker 5 Like a quantum tunneling. It's like, you know, you know what the quantum tunneling you have.

Speaker 2 Qasim explained to me that quantum tunneling is this real thing that happens when electrons can just

Speaker 2 tunnel through a barrier that it doesn't seem like they should be able to. Almost like teleportation.

Speaker 5 Whoa. So what Dr.
Tey was trying to establish there is that we can make our own version of tunneling. Because here we are living

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I can't break through that barrier

Speaker 5 but we are also created from subatomic particles so how about to imagine ourselves as electrons and go to the moon

Speaker 5 yeah

Speaker 5 and we're talking here emotionally spiritually not an actual sense.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 And so Qasim began tunneling deeper and deeper into the quantum world, where he began to see a future for his life as a physicist.

Speaker 5 what

Speaker 2 did you start to,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 5 I think I would like go for a scholarship. It would be most likely France, the UK, or the US.

Speaker 5 I'm more into astrophysics. Oh, really?

Speaker 5 I wanted to visit NASA, SpaceX, to see the rockets, the Falcon and stuff,

Speaker 5 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 it is alive, I imagine myself.

Speaker 2 So you, okay, so you had these dreams of maybe like...

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then, for you,

Speaker 2 when did you know that was changing or that that possibility was eclipsing

Speaker 2 for the moment?

Speaker 5 Oh my god. What?

Speaker 2 Are you okay?

Speaker 5 No, no, no.

Speaker 5 I don't know if you hear it.

Speaker 5 They stated the generic.

Speaker 2 I hear it.

Speaker 5 This is a really interesting question. I really

Speaker 5 want to answer, but I don't know if you can hear my voice clearly. And I'm actually running my butter.
My butter is at 22%.

Speaker 2 Okay, so maybe what... Okay, so

Speaker 5 I'm so sorry.

Speaker 5 Not at all interesting.

Speaker 5 I'm really having fun with this. Me too.
I didn't really have time. I was having a great time with you.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 I really don't want this to end.

Speaker 2 Could we do, I don't know, could we do one more someday this week, or is it too dangerous for you?

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 it's not dangerous, I think.

Speaker 5 You know the situation, but I don't know. I don't think it would be dangerous.

Speaker 5 We can do it tomorrow if you want. Yeah, we'd love to do it.
Can we do it tomorrow? Can we do it tomorrow? Of course. Okay, yeah, of course.

Speaker 5 Tomorrow, same time.

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Speaker 2 October 7th, 2023, shortly after sunrise.

Speaker 5 At first, I'll be honest with you, I thought that was thunder.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 this

Speaker 5 stripes of the smokes that the rocket left behind.

Speaker 2 This was, of course, the Hamas attack that would kill over a thousand Israelis.

Speaker 2 And within hours, Israel would begin its counter-attack, which at the time of this recording recording has killed over 69,000 Palestinians.

Speaker 5 You can ask every Palestinian in Gaza and would tell you that from October 7,

Speaker 5 we knew that something unprecedented is coming and something we have never lived before, even our ancestors.

Speaker 2 Just days later, Israeli jets fly toward his university.

Speaker 5 All I see was a nibula of rubble, ash, and dust, a thick nibula that covered the whole camp. It was nothing that I have seen before.

Speaker 2 Two months later, Israeli tanks push into his neighborhood.

Speaker 5 We were in the middle of the streets when the bombshell started to fall upon our heads.

Speaker 5 The resonance, the sound of it, the high-pitched sound of the bombshell is still bouncing on and off between the walls of

Speaker 5 my skull. You know, I still remember the sound.
It was really, really loud.

Speaker 2 Did you think you were gonna die that day? I mean, did you think that was it?

Speaker 5 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 my fate, my destiny.

Speaker 5 Until my mother who's turned out to be braver than I than I do. Really?

Speaker 5 I swear, she bowled me from my back of the shed, the back of the shed and just aggressively pulled me towards the wall. It's the mother instinct, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 5 I can't remember much actually because it was all happening fast, you know. We just once we saw people going south, we just followed the crowd.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 They didn't know.

Speaker 5 What was that sway, do you think?

Speaker 5 Do you know the Ben Dolian movement?

Speaker 5 Bendalum, exactly. They were swaying like they didn't have the energy energy to walk, so they were swaying because they didn't know where to go.

Speaker 5 They didn't know where the road would end, they didn't know where their feet will land.

Speaker 2 Qasam and his family joined that procession of people flowing south.

Speaker 5 I actually hold

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It took us actually more than three hours that day to reach to the point point where we saw all people just sitting on the ground, didn't know what to do.

Speaker 5 Others were starting to build like makeshift tents and stuff.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 At some point in all the chaos, Qasim finds some internet, checks his phone, and sees a picture of Dr. Taya.

Speaker 5 Brown eyes warm, silver hair flipped back. I saw this post, you know, honoring Dr.
Taya and

Speaker 5 announced his killing. His hair was bumped by an Israeli airstrike.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 5 When Israel issued the massive displacement orders, the majority of people there took refuge in the southern Gaza. And Dr.
Sufyan Taya, amazingly, and

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I don't know if took refuge is the right choice of word, but that is where he was killed. Yeah.

Speaker 2 When you heard that news, what did you feel? What did you think?

Speaker 5 I don't know. I stopped there for one minute or two.

Speaker 5 I don't like um express myself more uh like loudly or something i keep it to myself so i just like stopped and like holding my my phone and um just stopped looking at the at the post at the time and i couldn't believe it you know

Speaker 2 then a month later the israeli government prevents Qasem's aunt Samar from traveling to Egypt for medical treatment

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Despite being a pretty private person, he begins publishing pieces describing his reality.

Speaker 5 To speak up, to speak loud, and to scream at the wall to take action.

Speaker 2 He started with a poem about his aunt.

Speaker 5 I miss you. I miss spending time with you.

Speaker 5 The memories keep buzzing above your couch.

Speaker 2 Then he wrote an elegy to Dr. Taya.

Speaker 5 Life feels different now that Israel has killed my professor. Knowledge feels a trap behind unopenable gates.

Speaker 2 He wrote about bombed pharmacies and schools and life in a tent camp.

Speaker 5 Fires burn and check, garbage piles rotten the sun.

Speaker 2 And in nearly every essay, as he describes his surroundings in excruciating detail, at some point, he casts his light on the quantum world.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 stairs I'm climbing that are the creation operator.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 there's all this stuff that you write about so beautifully, but it is, it's quantum is so hard to understand and like

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 And so you're trying to scream out by describing reality But then you're using these quantum terms, which are so hard.

Speaker 2 Do you worry that, like

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 which is hard to understand.

Speaker 5 Well, I come from a scientific background.

Speaker 5 I'm studying physics. I studied physics.
And

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 If you are a doctor you would see people like, I don't know, like cases or something. If you are an engineer you start picturing people like machines or something.

Speaker 5 So that's me, a physicist, a student of physics, trying to live a genocide. And my heaven, my only heaven that I can take refuge in is the world of physics.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And surprisingly, you built it for yourself. I'm actually building this place on a daily basis, even inside my head.
I'm not talking here physically, it's actually all in my head.

Speaker 5 But if I can escape inside my head, and if I can escape inside the bathes and the maze of

Speaker 5 physics and quantum physics, and

Speaker 5 this

Speaker 5 seemingly arbitrary and randomness of physics, well, so be it.

Speaker 5 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 on a daily basis.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 In May of 2024, Israel invades Rafah.

Speaker 5 Which is now lies in not in rubble. It lies in sand.

Speaker 2 You're saying it's beyond rubble.

Speaker 5 Exactly, yeah. It's beyond rubble right now.
It's become a desert.

Speaker 2 In July, one of his best friends is killed in an airstrike.

Speaker 5 Israel can come for the houses, they come for the hospitals, they come for

Speaker 5 the streets and for the schools. But I was like thinking, can they reach an atom?

Speaker 5 Like if I was living inside an atom, if I'm picturing myself like an electron, is that would be like my safe haven, my safe refuge where Israel or the Israeli army can reach me?

Speaker 2 And in December of 2024,

Speaker 2 he realizes something.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So many people know I'm inside it, but none can tell if I'm alive or dead.

Speaker 2 He writes about this realization in an essay using one of the most famous and maddening quantum thought puzzles called Schrödinger's Cat.

Speaker 2 I'm going to cliff'note it just so we can get back to Cossim's writing, but basically, Schrödinger's cat is a imaginary experiment that this Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger 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.

Speaker 2 So it goes like this.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And scientists love to fight about this.

Speaker 2 Schrödinger actually posed the whole thought puzzle as a kind of snub at quantum physics, saying, okay, there's no way that a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time.

Speaker 2 So we are misinterpreting what the math is saying about reality.

Speaker 2 But other scientists say, no, you know, I think maybe the cat is both dead and alive.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 back to Costum's essay.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 5 Exactly.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I have been locked in 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.

Speaker 5 I was content with the box I used to have before this work.

Speaker 5 You know, we were like, so, I don't know, adjusted to it. It wasn't perfect, but we adjusted to it.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 you know, life goes on and we have to go with it. But right now, it's taking place in an ever-shrinking box.

Speaker 5 So I'm sympathizing with the cat, I'm empathizing with the cat, because the cat is me and I am the cat.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 2 It's like you're saying you are experiencing superposition, this duality.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 5 It feels like if, God forbid, someone had pointed a gun to your head. Like you're walking to your life with someone like

Speaker 5 walking behind you with a gun pointing to the back of your head. So yeah, that's what it feels like.
It's horror.

Speaker 5 It's

Speaker 5 a horror. We are horrified on a daily basis.

Speaker 5 If I go to grab food for my family, I'll be dead.

Speaker 5 If I went to the sea to catch some fish,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 If I was in the car,

Speaker 5 I might be hit. If I went anywhere in Gaza, I might be hit and targeted and killed.
So yeah, it's...

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 before the war I was trying to 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.

Speaker 5 And you you the one who need to investigate this time do you do you feel that the the shift in here

Speaker 5 it's like you went from scientist to object of study exactly exactly I am the one who is inside the box I am the one who is in who is a trap I am the one who is stuck and can't I

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I tried, I failed, and it's your turn right now.

Speaker 5 In the short angles, cat experiment.

Speaker 5 Everyone asked whether the cat was alive or dead, but none actually opened the box to see.

Speaker 5 If they had, the super position would have collapsed, and the cat would only be dead if they didn't open the box in time.

Speaker 5 We're not cats.

Speaker 5 Please open the box.

Speaker 7 Is my sound cutting off or anything?

Speaker 2 Is it no? You said you sound great. Can you hear me okay?

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 2 So we're recording this. It's October 16th, 2025, six days after the ceasefire officially went into effect.

Speaker 2 And I guess like with the news of the ceasefire spreading, how has the box changed for you in the last week?

Speaker 7 It's the same box, but it got only quite a

Speaker 7 but it doesn't change that I'm still trapped inside this box.

Speaker 7 Like from my own point of view, when I hear the ceasefire announcement, I thought one the first question that bobbed into my mind was what is my options right now?

Speaker 7 I don't have a house, I don't have a job, I don't have a life, I don't even have clothes to protect myself from winter.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And I went with the first light of the morning because, you know, we take the whole distance between Al-Mos to Eastern Khanits on foot, and we were shot at by a helicopter,

Speaker 5 an Israeli drone.

Speaker 2 And this was after the official ceasefire?

Speaker 7 Yes, that was a day after. It was actually the last Tuesday.
So,

Speaker 7 we're not going back to my house until further notice from the Israeli army because it's a bit dangerous in there.

Speaker 7 The ceasefire doesn't mean the genocide has stopped, it just transformed to other shapes, to other forms of it.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we're trapped more than ever right now, and I don't think it will change anytime soon.

Speaker 7 I don't just want to be exist like inside this box.

Speaker 7 I do want want to live.

Speaker 7 We always want something that is beyond our

Speaker 7 physical or something metaphysical, something imaginative, something that

Speaker 7 can give us a reason.

Speaker 2 Shortly after he said this, the call dropped. Oh, I think I lost you.

Speaker 7 Hi again, I'm so sorry. Hi internet as usual.

Speaker 2 No, no, not at all.

Speaker 2 I was gonna say, how's the electricity grid? How's the internet? Is that still?

Speaker 7 Well, you know, the sun is going down actually, and so it's getting like slower and slower by batteries.

Speaker 2 Is it like every night you can't escape

Speaker 2 you can't you get cut off from the world?

Speaker 7 Yeah, because at night we don't have electricity anymore because it's all powered by the sun.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 My first ever

Speaker 7 question about stars is why there are pulsing, you know?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I learned about it like many years later, why the pulsing happens. It was always because because of our atmosphere, because of how the wind changes its direction through the layers of our atmosphere.

Speaker 7 It had nothing to do with the nature of the star itself.

Speaker 5 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 7 The more I learn about them, you know, it's always like

Speaker 7 it's not a toxic relationship. It's always like when I know

Speaker 5 because you know, when

Speaker 7 in relationship, when you know more about your partner,

Speaker 7 you start having some sort of a problem. But this is the

Speaker 5 right. I mean, sometimes knowledge can extinguish magic.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 7 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,

Speaker 7 me with the stars, it was more of a feeling, an everlasting good feeling that it actually makes me feel good even about myself.

Speaker 2 Can you see any stars right now?

Speaker 7 I can't walk outside.

Speaker 7 Just give me a second.

Speaker 7 So I'm actually sitting sleeping outside right now, but I can't uh

Speaker 7 recognize any buttons unfortunately. But I know for sure that the uh Orion belt would be on the southern side of the uh of the sky right now.

Speaker 5 But you can't you can't see them.

Speaker 7 You know, yeah, because Gaza with the

Speaker 7 this war alone produced more greenhouse gases.

Speaker 7 I'm trying really hard. Yeah, I'm so sorry, but I can't recognize any buttons.
It seems like foggy

Speaker 5 up there.

Speaker 2 This episode was produced by Jessica Young. It was edited by Alex Deeson.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We had a ton of editorial support on this one, so big thanks to everyone who weighed in. Kacha Rogers, Sara Kari, Karim Katan, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, and Alan Adams.

Speaker 2 Also, if you'd like to read Qasim's whole essay, it's called I Am Stuck in a Box like Schrödinger's in Gaza, and it was published on Al Jazeera December 19th, 2024.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It goes into how there's like actually quantum stuff going on in our bodies, in our proteins.

Speaker 2 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 slash join. Many, many thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 Catch you next week.

Speaker 8 Hi, I'm Ba Sethkari, and I'm from Somerset, New Jersey. And here are the staff credits.
Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor.

Speaker 8 Sarah Sandback is our executive director. And our managing editor is Pat Walters.
Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W.

Speaker 8 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyasambandham, Matt Kielty, Mona Medgafker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Anissa Witze, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand.

Speaker 8 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 9 Hi, I'm Maddie, and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Simmons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 9 Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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