Quantum Refuge

0:28Wait, you're listening? 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? I think it's very interesting because for a person who lives this madness in Gaza, So 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.

1:14You don't? Okay. Yeah, I don't believe in it.

1:21This 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.

2:17And how that unthinkable chaos granted him access to perceive that confusing quantum state at the bottom of our physical world.

2:31If that makes no sense, I promise it will when Qasim 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.

2:52I wonder if you can just start by describing your reality right now. 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 will 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 Murag, the cursing.

3:37And 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 who's a flower. You can't survive on them for the last two or three days. What is that sound that I hear? Is that a plane? 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 pump is going to hit the ground.

4:25If it's going to be a drone, if it's going to be a helicopter. Are you less safe by being here right now talking to me? Is this a risk? 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. 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 better access to the Internet, which is not very good, actually.

5:09But, you know, this is what I've got in here. So, yes. So from the noise of that cafe, Qasim told me where his story with quantum physics began. 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 it from time to time. But I remember I was in the eighth grade.

5:49I 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 was light on was the three dots in the sky, which later on I found the name of them, which is called the Orion Belt. And Qasem would wonder about those twinkling pearls in the sky.

6:48What they are made of, why they are pulsing. You know, when you look at the stars, they have this awesome light on and off. if this was some sort of a language or something. Like a Morse code? Exactly.

7:26And there was someone in his life he could take these questions to. 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. 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. You're writing about quantum mechanics, like, all the time. Are you sure you're not a geek?

8:08No, 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 male and female and between spouses and stuff. He was a romantic guy, yeah. Qasim says he thinks his dad wanted to be a poet. But, you know, being a poet or a writer wasn't something, like, plausible.

8:48My 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. Qasim's father died in 2016 when Qasim was 19 years old. 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.

9:31That's how he actually inspired me to continue with the physics field. 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? 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 wanted me to decide what I want. And what he wanted was to study physics. So he did at the Islamic University of Gaza.

10:12I don't know. It was the most beautiful place in the whole Gaza Strip. The canvas 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 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. You can see, like, casually, a professor would take a bunch of students and sit under a tree to teach them about something.

11:01It 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 feel the freedom there.

11:22And that's when I stumbled into quantum mechanics. He took a few classes his first years, but it was his junior year that he met the guy who had changed the course of his life. Dr. Sufjan Taya, a renowned physics professor and president of the whole university. What did Dr. Taya look like? Okay, he was a catch, if I can say that. A catch? Exactly. 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. How did he do his hair? 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.

12:11We 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, you know these old books we have and they smell unique? He was like, he was an old book that smells nice. 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.

13:07They 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. I know this is a little messed up. 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 it, it collapses out of superposition, back down into one thing or the other. What? Richard Feynman, which is, in my perspective, the most brilliant physicist ever been.

13:59Like, 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. 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. 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.

14:47It's like crashing two cars and a bicycle came out from this collision. You know, it was so bizarre. And sitting in Dr. Taya's classroom, Qasem was hooked. 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. If you had to pin like one thing that really grabbed you, which one would it be? Like a quantum tunneling. It's like, you know, you know what the quantum tunneling? 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.

15:36Whoa. So what Dr. Tay 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. But we are also created from subatomic particles. So how about to imagine ourselves as electrons and go to the moon?

16:24Yeah. 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.

16:45And so Qasim began tunneling deeper and deeper into the quantum world, where he began to see a future for his life as a physicist.

16:59What? 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? I think I would go for a scholarship. It would be most likely France, the UK, or the US. I'm more into astrophysics. Oh, really? 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 could be quite something, actually. And that is a life I imagined myself. 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.

17:59And then for you, when did you know that was changing or that possibility was eclipsing for the moment. Oh, my God. What? Are you okay? No, no, no. I don't know if you hear it. They stated the generator all over again. Yeah, yeah. Do you hear it? I hear it. This is a really interesting question. I really wanted to answer it, 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%. Okay, so maybe what? Okay, so... I'm so sorry. No, not at all. I'm so sorry. Not at all. I'm really having fun. Me too. I am too. I'm really having a really great time with you.

18:47Yeah, I really don't want this to end. Could we do, I don't know, could we do one more someday this week or is it too dangerous for you? 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 do it tomorrow if you would like. Yeah, I would love to do it. Can we do it tomorrow? Of course, of course. Yeah, yeah, of course. Tomorrow, same time.

19:23October 7th, 2023. Shortly after sunrise. 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 rocket launching. Every single area from Gaza is actually has these stripes of the smokes that the rocket left behind. 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.

20:09You 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. Just days later, Israeli jets fly toward his university. All I see was a nebula of rubble, ash and dust, a thick nebula that covered the whole camp. It was nothing that I have seen before. Two months later, Israeli tanks push into his neighborhood. 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-bitched sound of the bombshell is still bouncing on and off between the walls of my skull.

20:54I still remember the sound. It was really, really loud. Did you think you were going to die that day? I mean, did you think that was it? 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 turned out to be braver than I do. Yeah, I swear. She pulled me from my back of the chair, the back of the chair, 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 happening fast, you know?

21:38We 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, staggering like drunks, you know? What was that sway, do you think? Do you know the bendolium movement? Yeah, pendulum? Pendolium, 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 would land. And Qasim and his family joined that procession of people flowing south.

22:19I 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 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. At some point in all the chaos, Qasem finds some internet, checks his phone, and sees a picture of Dr.

23:06Taya, brown eyes warm, silver hair flipped back. I saw this post, you know, honoring Dr. Taya and announced his killing. His house was bombed by an Israeli strike. Wow. When Israel issued the massive displacement orders, the majority of people there took refuge in the southern Gaza. and Dr. Sofianne 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. When you heard that news, what did you feel?

24:01What did you think? I don't know. I stopped there, like, for one minute or two. I don't, like, suppress 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? 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 U.S.

24:42is 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. To speak up, to speak loud, and to scream at the world to take action. He started with a poem about his aunt. I miss you. I miss spending time with you. The memories keep buzzing above your couch. Then he wrote an elegy to Dr. Taya. Life feels different now that Israel has killed my professor. Knowledge feels a trap behind unopenable gates. He wrote about bombed pharmacies and schools and life in a tent camp.

25:32Fires burn unchecked, garbage piles rotten the sun. And in nearly every essay, as he describes his surroundings in excruciating detail, at some point, he casts his light on the quantum world. Recently, I have noticed that my movement is similar to the quantum harmonic oscillator, QHO. So, in the QHO, electrons can also use a kind of stairs. 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. 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.

26:30I 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.

27:18Well, 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.

28:04You 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. I'm not talking here physically. 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 path and the maze of physics and quantum physics and these seemingly arbitrary and randomness of physics, well, so be it. I can, if they can offer me a safe 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.