AI Summary
5 min read🎙️ The Voices & The Context
The Format: This is a deeply personal, long-form interview. It’s a conversation between Radiolab host Lulu Miller and a single guest, recorded over several months. It feels intimate, like a phone call between two people trying to understand each other across an impossible distance.
The Key Players:
- The Host: Lulu Miller, co-host of Radiolab. She is empathetic, curious, and guides the conversation with gentle, probing questions.
- The Guest: Qassam Walid, a 28-year-old physicist living in Gaza. He is the heart of the episode. His unique perspective—using the lens of quantum physics to describe the horror of war—makes him a compelling and unforgettable voice.
The Vibe: Intense, Sad, and Profoundly Educational. The episode oscillates between the brutal reality of war and the abstract, beautiful world of quantum mechanics. It’s a story of survival, loss, and the desperate search for a mental refuge.
🗝️ Key Themes & Topics
- Quantum Physics as a Survival Mechanism: The central theme. Qassam doesn’t just study physics; he lives it. He uses concepts like superposition, quantum tunneling, and Schrödinger's Cat to process the chaos, fear, and uncertainty of living through a genocide. It’s his mental escape hatch and his language for describing the indescribable.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Qassam Walid**
- 2 (04:25) **Qassam's Reality in Gaza (July 2025)**
- 3 (06:52) **How Qassam Fell in Love with Physics**
- 4 (12:59) **Meeting Dr. Sufyan Taya**
- 5 (19:45) **The War Begins: October 7th, 2023**
- 6 (28:23) **The Death of Dr. Taya**
- 7 (30:04) **Writing as a Scream to the World**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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.Â
Special thanks to Katya Rogers, Karim Kattan, Allan Adams, Sarah Qari, Soren Wheeler, and Pat Walters
EPISODE CREDITS:Â
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 -Â
- 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 -Â
Read a selection of Qasem’s published essays about his life in Gaza and the quantum world:Â
- I am stuck in a box like Schrodinger’s in Gaza (https://zpr.io/ALDVi9E5bRt8)Â
- Israel has turned Gaza’s summer into a weapon (https://zpr.io/YS4WK4hVQC5T)
- The Physics of Death in Gaza (https://zpr.io/hxsgxicVqPAd)Â
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