Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober by Victor Appleton II Page A

level that act the same way. If a certain process emits two particles and sends them flying off in different directions, there might be only two possible states each one of them can be in—‘heads or tails’—and between the two there can only be one of each."
    Chow snapped a pair of pudgy fingers. "I get what yer drivin’ at. If you catch one of them particools and it’s one way, you know th’ other one has t’be the other way!"
    "Pardner, that’s it exactly!" Tom congratulated him. "But now we get to the weird part—in fact they even call it quantum weirdness sometimes."
    "All ears, son. Cain’t be as weird as thet spooky steam."
    "Don’t be too sure! Because what many experiments have shown, over about a century, is that while the two particles are moving along their separate ways, each one exists in both states at the same time! They call it superposition , alternate possibilities coexisting. As if you had a coin that was both heads-and-tails on one side and both heads-and-tails on the other."
    "Coin like that wouldn’t be much use if’n ya flipped it to decide somethin’."
    "But actually it would work out after all, Chow. Because if you ‘flipped’ the ‘coin’ and looked at it—which in the case of the particles means interacting with them in some way that shows which of the two states one or the other particle is in—you’d always see either ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. Never both."
    The cook nodded. "So it’s like this, boss. It’s like a coin rollin’ on its edge. While it’s rollin’ along, it hasn’t made up its mind whether t’be up on one side or t’other. It’s both. But when you flick it over, then you get jest a head or jest a tail fer sure."
    "Okay, but the weirdest thing is this: when you interact with Particle A where you are, in a way that could tell you which one of the two states it’s in, Particle B takes on the other state instantly— even if it happens to be a billion miles away! "
    "Now son," said Chow with a look that was polite but slightly condescending, "what’s so blame strange about that ?"
    Tom was brought up short by Chow’s comment! "You don’t think it violates common sense for something happening here to cause a change in something instantly, no matter how far away it is? I mean—it could be in another galaxy !"
    Chow gave his head a shake. "Wa-aal now, Tom, yew jest think on it. Ain’t you sayin’ these two little bits are jest two sides of the same thing, like the two sides of a coin? And one thing is one thing. If you push on a pencil, you don’t have t’wait a while afore the end of it starts in writin’. Does it right away, whole thing at once."
    "But—there are two distinct particles― "
    "Uh-huh, sure, jest like they’s two sides to a penny, diff’rent from each other. Son, the only thing special is that the two sides is put in diff’rent places out in space. Pee-culiar, sure enough, but that don’t make ’em really two things. Still jest two sides o’ one thing. Stands t’ reason thet if you make the one yer flippin’ with yer hand fall heads down, the other one’ll turn tails up at the same time. If that there’s been botherin’ you, Tom, ole Chow says to jest relax."
    Pleased but thoroughly amazed, Tom put a hand on his friend’s wide and sloping shoulder and gave it a squeeze of sheer admiration. "Charles Ollaho Winkler, you just resolved the major metaphysical debate of modern science!"
    Chow shrugged. "Thet’s right nice, but it sure wudden much of a dee-bate. But now what’s all this got to do with a phone?"
    "The rest of it’s the easy part," replied the young inventor with a chuckle. "Basically, the device creates two sets of these paired counterpart particles, or ‘counterparticles’, holding each bunch of ‘halves’ suspended in separate cartridges—think of them as tanks, or particle-reservoirs. You then plug the cartridges into two communicator units. When you speak into one, the sound patterns of your voice