What science taught me about being a Muslim drag quee‪n‬ | Amrou Al-Kadhi

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2021

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

For a long time, Amrou Al-Kadhi struggled to negotiate the intersections between their queer and Islamic heritage. These identities felt completely polarized, as if their identity were founded on a tectonic fault at constant risk of rupture. Yet, it was the unlikely world of quantum physics that allowed Al-Kadhi to find the magic of contradictions -- and to revel in their intersectional identity.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, continuing our TED Audio Collective Friday series, something a little different today,
0:09.2	an episode from another TEDx podcast, TEDx Shorts, featuring writer and drag performer Amru Al-Qadi.
0:15.1	This might sound a little wild, but it's fascinating. Al-Qaeda uses the paradoxes of quantum physics to better understand identity.
0:24.2	If you enjoy it, find TEDx shorts wherever you're listening to this.
0:30.6	Contradictions have come to govern my life. As a queer person raised Muslim, contradictions of belief systems almost tore me apart.
0:38.8	Scientifically, the very foundation of our world is full of contradictions.
0:43.4	Quantum physics is a glorious and strange sect of physics that caused quite a stir in the
0:48.4	20th century world of science. Whereas classical Newtonian physics was ostensibly interested in observable reality on a kind of macro scale
0:57.1	and was interested in finding the fixed rules and formula that govern our universe at large,
1:02.3	quantum physics is interested in the very smallest things in our universe. For quantum physicists,
1:08.2	atoms are huge. Even the things that make up atoms, neutrons, protons,
1:12.4	electrons, they're huge. Quantum physics is interested in the very smallest subatomic particles,
1:17.9	you know, the Higgs, bosons, leptons, quarks. And the way that these subatomic particles behave
1:23.6	has defined what we thought were the fixed principles of our universe. So I'll explain this with the most simple experiment,
1:30.8	which is, well, the most famous experiment,
1:32.5	which is basically you have a wall with two slits and you fire an electron
1:35.7	through the wall, and the electron will either go through the left or right hole
1:38.6	and will be detected on the reader on the other end.
1:41.3	But every now and then, the same electron finds itself going through both
1:44.6	holes at the same time, and it's detected in two places. So the same electron finds itself
1:49.9	in more than one place at the same time. It kind of revealed that reality was a set of construct.
1:55.5	So by that I mean we can only really observe an abstracted or a kind of limited version of the
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