Quantum Refuge

Hey, I'm Molly Webster. Hey, I'm Mono Montgomery. Mono and I just made a snail episode. It's called snail sex tape. And we have not stopped talking about snails for like months. We've become deeply obsessed with snails. I think we should all get snail tattoos. Ooh, snail tattoo could be cute. But you know what, you can get instead of a snail tattoo. What? You can get an enamel snail pin in honor of our snail sex tape episode. I've never been more honored in my life. I know. It is based on a real medieval snail miniature. I will be rocking it on my gene jacket all spring long. So to get one of these pins, you have to join the lab. And when you join the lab in addition to helping fund our show, you get access to sponsor free podcasts, plus monthly bonus content, plus invitations to events with the team. Including an AMA that we're going to be doing next month, you and me about the behind the scenes of making snail sex tape. Behind the shell, BTS, all you have to do is go to radiolab.org slash join. And if you use the code word snail, you get two months off the first year of an annual membership. Get your pin. And we can't wait to see you guys next month. Thanks, everyone. Oh, wait, you're listening. OK. All right. OK. All right. Door listening to radio lab. Radio from W and Y. 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. 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, 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 alive is very intriguing. But scientifically speaking, I don't actually believe in it so much. You don't. OK. Yeah, I don't believe in it. So come on. This is custom-walled, 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, and how that unthinkable chaos granted him access to perceive that kind of fusing quantum state at the bottom of our physical world. If that makes no sense, I promise it will when Kossam 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. I 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 Hanyunis, which is in the south of Gaza, Gaza Strip. I'm actually in a cafe, which is in Al-Mawas area. Just a few people are here. But if I move outside, there would be like a Zillian people, because I'm right next to the 10 cam. 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 Murog cursing. Unfortunately, I couldn't take anything because there was like a Zillian people. It was so big 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 Kyluz, flour, you can 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 war plane, I think. It's a F60 or something. We hear this on a daily basis and we actually can't right now till which kind of a bomb is going to hit the ground if it's going to be a drone, if it's going to be a hot copter. Are you less safe by being here right now talking to me? Is this arrest? 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 call it right behind me just about like 30 or 40 meters. So, 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 a better access to the internet. Okay, not very good, actually, but you know, this is what I've got in here, so, yes. So from the noise of that cafe, Kassam 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 and 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% evolution because of the density, then the bomb makes it from time to time. But I remember I was in the 80th grade. I was 14 years old. I remember at what night 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, Lurlo. I still remember the scene. It looked like pearls. Pearls? Yeah, exactly pearls. But that night, I believe that some angel, just the sweep of the whole sky and the view was like full HD. The first thing that my eyes was light on, what was the three dots in the sky, which later on, I found the name of them, which is called the Orion Build. And Kasim would wonder about those twinkling pearls in the sky. What they are made of, why they are glossy? Now, 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, like a Morse code? Exactly. And there was someone in his life, he could take these questions too. 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, 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. Hey, I don't know, man, you're writing about quantum mechanics like all the time. Are you sure you're not a geek? No, I can't assure you, I'm not a geek. Well, you know, I wasn't intrigued. It was the end 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 a male and female and between spouses and stuff. He was a romantic guy, yeah. How some says he thinks his dad wanted to be a poet. But, you know, being a poet or a writer wasn't something like a plausible. And my 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 by lifting it. Cosm's father died in 2016 when Cosm 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 stood to me so many times that if he wanted to choose a field to major on, he would choose physics. He was brilliant, engineered, but he was so interested in physics. That'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 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. I don't know, it was the most beautiful place in the whole Gaza Strip. The canvas was like a painting. It was all three covered with trees, big trees, and maybe my best place and the 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 canvas. 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 pictures actually happening outdoors. You can see like casually a professor would take a bunch of the students and sit under a tree to teach them about something. It was a perfect scene for a student. It was the perfect place for a besieged student that is attracting Gaza to study in. Because you can't feel the freedom there. And 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 would change the course of his life. Dr. Sufyan 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? He was a catch. He was the most elegant person I have ever seen. His shoes were so tied up and clean. The way he actually did his hair. How do you do his hair? He actually flew a bit over to the back. He has this silver hair all around his head. And he was so elegant. We don't have this type of professor's 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. He would never raise his voice. He was like, I don't know. A working book that smells nice. Do you know the date? Yeah. You know these old books we have and they smell unique. He was like that. He wasn't 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. 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. 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. Richard Feynman, which is in my perspective, the most brilliant physicist, like Everpen, like he's the go to physics. And he was like so buzzled 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 mass 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 collided 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. It's like crashing two cars and a bicycle came out from the collision. You know? It was so bizarre. And sitting in Dr. Taya's classroom, Kassam 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 until 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, the quantum tunneling? Kassam 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. Whoa. So what Dr. Taya was trying to establish there is that we can make our own version of tunneling because here we are believing our life, hearing us 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 a candidate break through that barrier. But we are also created from subatomic botics. So how about to imagine ourselves as electrons and go to the moon? Yeah. And we're talking here emotionally, spiritually, not an actual sense. Then why not looking up? 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 a freeing does. So Kassam began tunneling, deeper and deeper into the quantum world, where he began to see a future for his life as a physicist. What? 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 it would like go for a scholarship. It would be most likely France, the UK or the US. I'm more into astrophysics. I wanted to visit NASA, space X 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 would be quite something actually. And this is a lot of I imagine myself. 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. And 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? I don't know if you're eating. Yeah. They stated they've been able to go over again. Yeah, yeah. I hear it. This is a really interesting question. I really wanted to also have the, I don't know if you can hear my voice clearly. I'm actually running out of battery. My battery is up to 22. Okay, so maybe? Okay, so, it's normal now. I'm so sorry. Not at all. I read it and read it and see it. Me too. I'm really grateful. 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. It's not dangerous, I think. Yeah. This situation, I don't know. I don't think it would be dangerous. We can do it tomorrow if you would. I get it. I would love to do it. Can we do tomorrow? Can we do tomorrow? That's good. Yeah, of course. Hey, Lulu here and this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. It is March in like a lion, out like a lamb, and somewhere in the middle, it's International Women's Day. And BetterHelp wants us all to just take a moment to consider the women in our lives, our personal lives, our society, and thank them for their strength and for all that they carry. That work matters. They matter. You matter. And therapy offers a space for all of us to take care of ourselves in the way we deserve. Think about the roles you play for the people you love. Think about how those roles, intentionally or not, weigh on you and in the worst moments, work to weigh you down. Therapy helps create perspective, set healthy boundaries and work toward balance, BetterHelp has loads of therapists, all of whom work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US. Why not give it a try? Fill out a short questionnaire and BetterHelp will use their 12 plus years of experience to match you with one. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time. Your emotional well-being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash radio lab. That's betterheelp.com slash radio lab. For all things classical, listen wherever you get your podcasts. After sunrise. At first I'd be honest with you. I thought that was thunder. Sometimes we get some thunder in autumn and gals and some drizzles 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 countless rocket launching if the single area from Gaza is actually has these stripes of the smogs 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. You can ask every Palestinian in Gaza and would tell you that from October 7th 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 is was a nipula of a probable ash and dust, a thick nipula that covered the whole camps. It was nothing that I've 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 on our heads. The resonance, the sound of it, the high bit sound of the bombshell is still bouncing on and off between the walls of my skull. You know I still remember that 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 there to be greater than I did. She bowed me from my back of the share, the back of the share and just aggressively bowed 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. We just once we saw people going south we just followed the crowd and people were like walking towards Rafa because it's the southern's Gaza. They were walking like a drunks swaying like staggering like a drunks you know. What do you what was that sway do you think? Do you know the bin dolly movement? Yeah, I'm panjoing. You panjoing? Yeah, I panjoing. Exactly. When they were moving the swaying like the kid didn't have the energy to work. So they were swaying because they didn't know where to go. They didn't know where the road with them. They didn't know where their feet will land. Qasim and his family joined that procession of people flowing south. I 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 that just sitting on the ground didn't know what to do. Others were starting to build like a makeshift tent and stuff and I have never built a tent before so it was the time for me to move into a new world and you know the 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 Qasim finds some internet checks his phone and sees a picture of Dr. Taya, brown eyes warm, silver hair flipped back. I saw this post you know honoring Bukuturtaya and announced his killing. His hair was bombed by an Israeli. Wow. When Israel issued the massive disablistment orders the majority of people there took refuge in the southern Gaza and Dr. Sufyan Taya 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 a home is located in there and he took refuge in there. I don't know if the refuge is the right choice of word but that is where he was killed. Yeah. When you heard that news what did you feel? What 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 Qasim'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 US is continuing to send billions of dollars in bombs and other military aid to Israel and in the spring of 2024 Qasim 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 wall 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 an open of a gates. He wrote about bombed pharmacies and schools and life in a tank camp. Fires burn and check garbage piles rot in 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. In the QHO electrons can also use a kind of a stirs. 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 stirs of a climbing that are the creation of a greater. 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. I mean there's all this stuff that you write about so beautifully but it is its 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. Well 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 right are 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 lecturing people like machines or something. So that's me a physicist, a student of physics trying to live a genocide. And my only heaven 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, you feel like you own it and you feel like you can 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. And I'm not taking care physically it's actually it's all in my head but if I can escape inside my head and I can escape today inside the bottles and the maze of physics and quantum physics and in these as seemingly arbitrarily and randomness of physics will also be it. I can't if we can offer me a safe place if we can't offer me refuge if we can't offer me some comfort then I'm lucky I think to have this while two other millions in Gaza suffering in a daily basis 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. In May of 2024, Israel and Vyad's Rafa. Which is now lies in nothing, Robert. Let's lies in sand. You're saying it's beyond trouble. Exactly. It's beyond trouble right now. It's become a desert. In July one of his best friends is killed in an air strike. Israel can come for the houses, they come for the hospitals, they come for the streets and for the schools. But I was like thinking can they reach an atom like if I was living inside an atom if I'm big sharing myself like an electron is that would be like my safe haven my safe refuge where where Israel or the Israeli army can reach me. And in December of 2024 he realizes something. Like Shurdinger's famous cat I'm a trapped in a box. I have been stuck in this box since the beginning of Israel's genocidal war in my homeland Gaza. So many people know I'm inside it but none can tell if I'm alive or dead. He writes about this realization in an essay using one of the famous and maddening quantum thought puzzles called Shurdinger's cat. I'm going to close note it just so we can get back to costumes writing. But basically Shurdinger's cat is a imaginary experiment that this Austrian physicist Erwin Shurdinger 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. So it goes like this. 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. 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? And scientists love to fight about this. Shurdinger actually posed the whole thought puzzle as a kind of snub at quantum physics saying like okay there's no way that a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time. So we are misinterpreting what the math is saying about reality. But other scientists say no you know I think maybe the cat is both dead and alive. So back to costumes essay. Like a shurdinger's cat I'm locked in a box that will eventually kill me. Luckily I'm not dead yet. But am I alive? I'm writing this surely but I can't leave the box. The only outcome available to me is death. So I am afraid I can't say that I'm alive either. Seemingly my existence 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. Is what you're saying like you're 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? Exactly. 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 and me. I'm talking about the human, about the Palestinian who is a stocking Gaza. Not only for two years because we this is misleading. I'm a stocking Gaza for 20 years. I have been lucky in this box for two decades. I can't say for I don't know like seven decades. I don't know how to describe it. I was satisfied. I was content with the box I used to have before this world. We were like so I don't know adjusted to it. It wasn't perfect but we adjusted to it. 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 you know like goes down and we have to go with it. But right now it's taking place in an ever shrinking box. So I'm sympathizing with the cat. I'm empathizing with the cat because the cat is me and I am the cat. Everything in life seems to follow a certain binary system from electrons which are spin in one direction or the other. To human beings which can be either alive or dead. 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 in being it seems. So what am I? It's like you're saying you are experiencing superposition. This duality that superposition concept is something that again the brightest minds in science can't quite fathom they just say just accept it like we can't even you can't imagine it 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? It's feel like if that's forbid someone had buoyant a gun to your head like you're walking to your life with someone like walking behind you with a gun biting to the back of your head. So yeah that's what it feels like. It's horror. It's a horror. We are horror fight on a daily basis. If I go to grab food from my family I'll be dead. If I went to the sea to catch some fish 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. If I went to if I was in the car I might be hit. If I went anywhere and because I might be be hit and targeted and killed. So yeah it's I don't know I can't describe it actually. I'm sorry it's it's insane. No it's insane. No one can live like this. Before the war I was trying 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 he look this is the reality of Gaza and you the one who need to investigate this time. Do you feel that the shift in you? It's like you went from scientists to objective study. Exactly exactly. I am the one who is inside the books. I am the one who is in who is trapped. I am the one who is stuck and can't take 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 decline the ladder to open the books. It is not up to me. I tried. I failed and it's you turn right now. I'm out of breath. I'm out of breath. In the Shardinghuz, Katix Berman, everyone asked whether the cat was alive or dead but none actually opened the box to see if they had the superposition would have collapsed and the cat would only be dead if they didn't open the box in time. We're not cats. Please open the box. Is my self cutting off or anything? No, you sound great. Can you hear me? Yes. We're recording this. It's October 16th, 2025. Six days after the ceasefire officially went into effect. I guess with the news of the ceasefire spreading, how has the box changed for you in the last week? The same box, but it got only quieted. But it doesn't change that I'm still trapped inside the box. From my own photo review, when I hear the ceasefire announcement, I thought the first question that popped into my mind was what is my options right now? I don't have a house, I don't have a job, I don't have a life, I don't even have a clothes to to protect myself from winter. I actually tried to sneak out to my neighborhood a couple of days ago to save some clothes, winter clothes and some books of from underneath the rubble. And I went with the first light of the morning because you know, we take the whole distance between Allah so to Easter and ten years on foot and we were shot at by a footcarter. I was really drawn, yeah. And this was after the official ceasefire? I have, yes. That was a day after. It was actually the last Tuesday. So we're not going back to my house until further notice from the Israeli army because it's a bit dangerous. The ceasefire doesn't mean the genocide has stopped. It just transformed to other shapes, to other forms of it. And 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 path, it's the same reality. Yeah, we're trapped more than ever right now and I don't think it will change any time soon. I don't just want to be exist like inside the spokes. I do want you to live. Yeah, we always want something that is beyond our physical or something metaphysical, something imaginative, something that can give us a reason. Shortly after he said this, the call dropped. Oh, I think I lost you. Hi again, I'm so sorry. I've been turned it as usual. No, no, not at all. I was going to say how's the electricity grid? How's the internet? Is that still? Well, you know, the sun is going down actually and so it's getting like slower and slower by battery. Is it like every night you can't escape, you can't, you get cut off from the world? Yeah, because at night we don't have electricity anymore because it's all powered by the sun. 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. My first ever question about stars is why they are pulsing, you know. Yeah, I learned about it like many years later why the pulsing happens. It was always because of the our atmosphere because of how the wind changes its direction. It's where the layers of our atmosphere, it's had nothing to do with the nature of the star itself. No, interesting. The more I learn about it, you know, it's always like it's not a toxic relationship. It's always like when I know, because you know when in relationship when you know more about your partner, you just start having some sort of a problem. But this is the thing that happens. Yeah. So right, I would have made some times knowledge, can extinguish magic. 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. Me with the stars is the more of a feeling and ever lasting good feeling that it actually makes me feel good even about myself. Can you see any stars right now? I can't walk outside, just give me a second. Okay. So I'm actually sitting, sitting outside right now, what I can't recognize any buttons fortunately. But I know for sure that the Orion belt would be on the southern side of the of the sky right now. But you can't see them. You know, yeah, because Gaza is with the, this war alone produced more greenhouse gases. I'm trying really hard. Yeah. I'm so sorry, but I can't recognize any better. It seems like foggy. Yeah. Of there. This episode was produced by Jessica Young, was edited by Alex Deason, 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. 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. We had a ton of editorial support on this one, so big thanks to everyone who weighed in, caught your Rogers, Sara Cari, Karim Katan, Thorne Wheeler, Pat Walters, and Alan Adams. Also, if you'd like to read Kusum's whole essay, it's called I Am Stuck in a Box like Shrodinger's in Gaza. And it was published on Al Jazeera, December 19th, 2024. 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, 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 to go into how there's like actually quantum stuff going on in our bodies, in our proteins. And you can listen to that if you become a member of the lab, which is the way that you can support Radio Lab by heading on over to radialab.org slash join. Many, many thanks for listening. Catch you next week. Hi, I'm Basit Kari and I'm from Somerset, New Jersey, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lethif Nasir. So, Reeler is our executive editor. Sara Sandbag 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. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierez, Sindhun Nia Sanbandam, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesin, Sara Kari, Anisa Vita, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, Angesaka Young, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol Masini, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Maddie and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership Support for Radio Lab's Science Programming is provided by the Simmons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred Keith Lone Foundation. Every day, WNYC Studios is working to get closer to New York and to New Yorkers. The underwriting we get from businesses helps power our independence. Learn how your organization can join in at sponsorship.wnyc.org.