Quantum Refuge

In July 2025, a 28-year-old physicist named Qassam Walid sat in a café in Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza, and described his reality to a Radiolab reporter. An F-16 hummed overhead. He had spent three days searching for flour. He was speaking from a tent camp where the nearest bomb had landed 30 or 40 meters behind him. And he was using quantum mechanics—superposition, tunneling, Schrödinger’s cat—to explain what it felt like to live through a genocide. Not as a metaphor. As a lived experience.

Qassam’s story begins long before the war. As a boy in Gaza, he would lie on his roof and watch the stars pulse on and off, wondering if they were sending him a kind of Morse code. His father, an engineer and a frustrated poet, taught free physics lectures to neighbors and relatives, and Qassam would slip into the room to listen. His father died when Qassam was 19, but he had already set the course: Qassam would study physics at the Islamic University of Gaza. There, he met Dr. Sufyan Taya, the university’s president and a renowned physicist. Dr. Taya was elegant, silver-haired, and spoke about quantum mechanics with a kind of poetry. He taught Qassam about superposition—the maddening fact that subatomic particles exist in multiple states at once until they are measured. He taught him about quantum tunneling, where electrons can pass through barriers that seem impossible to cross. “We are