or rather, the world itself is different slightly…in that it is an entirely different world. Sorry, let me back up. My name’s Jake, and I am, I think, a fourth year graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute studying quantum mechanics. Why the “I think” you ask? Right. Well, I inherited a radio from my grandfather on my 27th birthday with a note on top, saying:

Understanding is the journey to knowledge. To most, it is unattainable because it lies behind closed doors. My gift to you: this key. Enjoy your journey. Pop-Pop

He had died a few days before, and one of the main regrets I had was that I wasn’t there when he died. I read the note a few times after it was delivered to me, and then placed the radio on the right corner of my desk, originally tuned to 93.1 FM. It remained there for a few days and I’d almost forgotten about it until a few months ago.

It was a Saturday and I was starting some routine reading. The subject matter was starting to bore me, and as I tapped my pencil eraser tip on the desk, my eyes focused on the radio, which was merely a decorative piece until now. Reaching over, I rotated the channel knob a couple of notches to the right. Nothing happened, and I didn’t expect it to. No music and no news. The thing was busted. Shrug. I just started doing some homework.

A couple of hours later, I decided to stretch my legs outside. I opened the front door, stepped outside, and it wasn’t until I finished locking the door that I realized my surroundings. Wait. Where was I? Everything was different. My house was the same, but it was enveloped by older high-rise apartments. Venturing further from my house, my breaths became shorter. The pollution choked my throat, so I covered my mouth with the front of my shirt. As I walked down the block, shops crowded the city scene at the street level, each with signs written in a pictographic language, possibly Chinese. Above every store a hundred floors of apartment windows rested. While vendors appeared to be open, the roads and streets were sparsely littered with a few people in a rush, most of whom were too busy to notice me, all of whom were wearing masks, and all of whom looked Asian. I glanced towards my house halfway down the block. Whew, it was still there albeit severely out of place.

Someone bumped me, and I instinctively, I responded, “Excuse me, sorry.” He spun around with bewildered eyes like he’d just seen an alien. Then, he shouted something Chinese, and others stopped to stare at the spectacle. Feeling pretty uncomfortable as people started to approach me, I decided it was time to high-tail it out of there and run back into my house.

I slammed the door and looked through the peephole. Good, no one followed me. What was going on? What happened? After a few moments of unanswerable lines of questioning, I backtracked all the things that I’d done before deciding to take that fateful stroll. There had to be a connection with what was going on outside: what did I remember before all this started. After some experimentation, I reached the conclusion pretty quickly that the culprit was my radio. My radio had sent me to a different world. After slipping it back to 93.1, I was relieved as much as I’d ever been to step outside to a sunny Saturday morning in upstate New York.

Technically, my little excursion to an alternate reality was also upstate New York. At least that was and is my current hypothesis. You see, in quantum mechanics, there’s an interpretation that says that whatever can happen does happen. It’s just that it happens on different a worlds. Say that I have reached a fork in some road, and I decide to turn left. There’s an entirely different world out there where I had decided to turn right. Extended to every possible decision ever made, my field in physics calls this the “many worlds/universes interpretation”.

Apparently, my grandfather’s radio was a way to bridge the gap between worlds, and the FM channels index a subset of them somehow.

Over the next few months, I experimented with the dial on the radio. Sometimes the world that I opened my door to destroyed my perception of the possible. Other times, I felt sorry for the world’s inhabitants. Still other times, I couldn’t tell the difference from our world. In every case, the one constant was my house, and I was always the only one who ever inhabited it. That is, all of the worlds were like this except for the one indexed by channel 106.5 FM.

Last night, after taking a break from physics homework, I slowly turned the radio knob, click by click, to 106.5. I had been documenting each one of the worlds in a notebook, trying to find a pattern between them. While reaching for the notebook this time, all the hairs on my body instantly rose and stiffened. What was that? Quiet, Jake. Listen.

Someone was breathing heavily like they had asthma. I looked back towards my closed door. The lights outside in the hallway were off. I swore that I had turned them on before I had started studying. “Why are they off,” I whispered underneath my breath.

Foot steps. Closer. The creaks in the wood betrayed the person’s location, as did his breathing. As they reached my door, my heart pounded. The handle on the door started to rotate.

Snap out of it, Jake! I jerked around and twisted the knob on the radio hard left, keeping an eye on the handle of the door without looking at where I’d turned the radio. It had stopped and the lights were back on outside. I took a deep breath and put my attention back on the radio dial, currently set to 94.5. Okay, whew. Let’s flip this guy back to my home world.

“Unknown”, I wrote in the log of worlds in my notebook next to 106.5 FM with red ink. Out loud, I then murmured, “I need to take a break from this for a while,” and dropped my grandfather’s radio into the bottom drawer of my desk.

A few days passed by, but the magical radio weighed heavily on my mind. My schoolwork had already begun to suffer prior to today, but over the next few days, I didn’t even bother to head onto campus. I stayed in my room, finding relevant academic journal paper after paper on relevant physics principles that could explain my experiences.

I had stopped eating; it didn’t occur to me that I was hungry. At times, I found myself reaching down to pull out the bottom drawer fueled with the guiding push of suspense. When my consciousness caught up to me in these moments, I would rapidly pull my hand back in fear. I’d become isolated, and even my Ph.D. adviser had voiced some concern in my behavior.

He had called on the phone. After some pleasantries, he stated his mind while being considerate enough not to dig into my specific issues. “Look, Jake, I like you, but I have six other students to support. Your fellowship is almost up, and I know you might be going through some stuff. You don’t have to come to me for help, but I’ve heard the tremor in your voice before.

“During my tenure at RPI, more brilliant minds have been felled by fear and emotion in pursuing world-class research. If I may, a scientist’s job is to pursue the truth. Thesis aside, it looks to me like you have two options. Stand still, or do something. Only one of those options will give you a resolution. You don’t have to tell me anything, Jake, but I’m rooting for you. Good luck.”

He hung up, and I was alone in my room again. For reasons that I can’t explain, I suddenly realized that my focus had been so single-minded. After my adviser called, my head started to clear. He was right.

Another thing I realized was that I smelled. I jumped in the shower and stayed there for half an hour, letting the steam clean my pores. After drying off and getting dressed, I returned to my room and took a deep breath before I opened the bottom drawer of my desk. I grabbed my grandfather’s radio, placed it on my desk, and turned the frequency knob to the right from 93.1 FM. I slowed as it neared my intended final channel: 106.1 FM, 106.3 FM, and then…106.5 FM.

With a full expectation of something spectacular to happen, I turned around, scanning from ceiling to floor. Then, I jumped about six feet into the air. My door was open, but that wasn’t what startled me. Standing in the middle of my room with a grin on his face was an older bald man, bespectacled, and leaning on his cane. It was my grandfather.

“Hello, Jacob. I’ve been expecting you.”

“Pop-pop. I’ve missed you. How is this possible?”

“My dear Jacob. You must have had an amazing number of adventures in other realms.”

“Yes, I knew no one in any of them. How are you alive, even in this world?”

“Not everything can be explained by a unifying theory of physics even if we did reach a set of equations that could do so. Don’t think too hard with your mind, Jacob.”

I ran over to him and gave him a hug.

“I can’t stay too long here, Jacob. I was just waiting to see you.”

“Where are we? We’re on another world in our multi-verse, right?”

“Not quite, my boy. Yes, I’d made this radio with the potential to visit many of other worlds that vibrate at different frequencies than ours, but this channel is special. It’s a channel that I found on my own. I never gave you an explanation.”

“You…are still dead?”

He nodded with a kind smile. “I’d like to think of it as I’m off to another adventure. I gave you the radio for you to explore and learn things that your world couldn’t teach you, but there was another part of the gift. This radio: it’s as much for you as it is for me because it gives me the chance to say goodbye.”

We talked and laughed for a few hours. I told him about RPI and some of the worlds that I’d been to. He told me some tricks about using the radio. And then, it was time. I held out my hand to shake his, and he just batted it away and hugged me. Then, he took my hand, put it on the knob, and said, “you’ll do great things, Jacob. Just remember the real world you came from, and remember to live your life there, no matter how much time you spend on others.”

With a proper introduction to the radio now, I turned the knob and begun a most educational multi-world lesson.