Is entanglement "spooky action at a distance"?
No. Nothing travels between entangled particles, and nothing done on one side can send a message to the other. Alice's questions and Bob's are far enough apart that every question on her side commutes with every question on his, so the order in which they ask changes nothing and there is no fact about who went first. What they share is a single description of the pair, and comparing their notes afterwards shows correlations stronger than any pre-agreed answer sheet could produce. Nick Herbert published a design for a faster-than-light telegraph in 1982 that used those correlations. It needed a machine to copy an unmeasured photon, and a two-line argument shows that no fixed machine copies an unknown state. Copying works only for states that have been written down as records.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 20: Why Does Nature Cheat, But Only By Exactly 2√2?watch a universe make its own particles