Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober by Victor Appleton II

WEIRDNESS
    "SPECTER-AL? Like ghosts? You mean spooks is causin’ it?" Chow gulped, turning paler than ever. "Don’t b’lieve in ghosts, m’self. But I sure don’t like ’em!"
    "Well, I don’t really mean that , exactly—but it certainly does look spooky." Tom shook his head in total bafflement.
    The "fireworks" were dancing not only in midair, but also along the top of the range, the cabinets, and tile wall surfaces. Tom noticed that the vapor explosions appeared to be spaced equal distances apart in long rows that curved across the room. As an explanation suddenly occurred to him, the young inventor burst into laughter.
    "Brand my rocket docker! What’s so all-fired funny?" Chow demanded, suspicious that Tom might have been playing a joke on him after all.
    "Relax, oldtimer," Tom said. "I think I know what’s causing it. Just wait here a second."
    The chef looked none too comfortable at the prospect of being left alone with such ghostly goings-on going on. But he waited obediently with bulging eyes while Tom dashed back to his laboratory. When the young inventor returned a few moments later, the fireworks had vanished!
    Chow looked relieved but mystified. "What in tarnation did you do, Tom?"
    "Just switched off my dual spacewave oscillators. I was using them to see how the wave-chain affected the obverse-state matrix in my parallelophone."
    Chow gave his friend a sour frown. "Well now! That sure explains it, don’t it!"
    With a laugh Tom explained that the spacewaves—oscillations in the fabric of spacetime that were the basis of his repelatron and several other inventions—were being generated at two separate sources. "The waves from either antenna aren’t tuned to affect us, but it seems that at such a low frequency intense focused heat is produced at the nodal points where the two chains cross, which I didn’t expect. This causes the water vapor in the air—and of course there’s quite a lot here in the kitchen—to turn to steam and pop-off like a firecracker."
    "That so?" Chow mopped his forehead with his huge red bandanna. "Jest plain ol’ steam, eh? Sure glad to hear it, son! But now, what was that other thing you said? Something about a telly-phone?"
    "Bud calls it a Private Ear Radio," responded Tom. "It uses quantum-entangled correlations to― " He stopped himself. "Sorry Chow. Quantum stuff is hard for anyone to grasp. I guess my explanation wouldn’t be very interesting to you." But then a new expression crossed Tom’s face. "Though actually... if you wouldn’t mind too much, pardner, I—I’d sort’ve like trying to spell it out to you."
    Chow suddenly understood. "Why sure, sure! You go right ahead, son. I’ll jest sit myself down on this stool."
    "Thanks. All right, then." Tom drew his thoughts together. Hadn’t he been looking for new challenges? Explaining quantum physics to Chow Winkler would be his greatest challenge yet! "The quantum level of matter involves what matter does at its smallest scale, the scale of the subatomic particles that atoms are made of. At that level, ordinary rules that we take for granted, commonsense sorts of things, don’t always apply. Which really isn’t surprising. After all, the ordinary rules come from what we see around us, and― "
    "And ya cain’t see them atoms an’ suchlike."
    "Right. Now... you know how a coin has two sides, heads or tails."
    "Sure do. Seen a few of ’em."
    "And if you saw a penny lying on a table heads-up, you wouldn’t have to turn it over to tell what’s on the other side."
    Chow nodded thoughtfully. "N’body’s that stupid. If’n it’s heads on top, it’s gotta be tails on the bottom."
    "Yes. And that’s an example of how two things—a ‘head’ face and a ‘tail’ face—can be tangled up with one another, so to speak. Turn one face upwards, and the other one has to turn downwards."
    "Yup. Ya might call it two sides o’ the same coin."
    The young inventor smiled. "Well, there are things at the quantum