Earlier quoted context omitted.
The part I don't understand is the "spooky action at a distance." Isn't this just the same as if the qbits were already in whatever their final state was as soon as they were entangled? Or in other words, is there any experimental basis for determining that the "cat" stayed alive at all? It seems a lot less magical when we just determine that in fact the value is the same no matter when or where you measure it, altho…
The idea that the qbits choose which value they'll collapse to at time of entanglement is called local hidden variable theory, which John Bell disproved in 1964: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_hidden_variable_theory In more practical terms, the theory also falls apart when you start doing more complicated things with entangled qbits than just measuring them, like quantum teleportation or error correction.
"A Bell test experiment or Bell's inequality experiment, also simply a Bell test, is a real-world physics experiment designed to test the theory of quantum mechanics in relation to two other concepts: the principle of locality and Einstein's concept of "local realism". The experiments test whether or not the real world satisfies local realism, which requires the presence of some additional local variables (called "hidden" because they are not a feature of quantum theory) to explain the behavior of particles like photons and electrons. According to Bell's theorem, if nature actually operates in accord with any theory of local hidden variables, then the results of a Bell test will be constrained in a particular, quantifiable way. If a Bell test is performed in a laboratory and the results are not thus constrained, then they are inconsistent with the hypothesis that local hidden variables exist."
Spooky private method scope is spooky.