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 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 -

• 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)

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