[Physicist]

For example, one might put either the Spade Ace or Heart Queen in a sealed mayonaise jar and place it on the steps of Funk and Wagnalls; the other card would be placed in sealed envelope and given to Price Waterhouse to place in a NASA launched space probe. If the mayonaise is later opened and has the Ace, one can be sure the probe has the Queen. One knows something about things far away, but there has been no information transmission.

Actually, the ace and queen would be examples of local hidden variables. We would expect such correlations to respect Bell's Inequality, whereas quantum correlations do not. There really is no classical analog.

I wrote a layman's explanation of what Bell's Inequality is, and why its violation is so puzzling, but it's not as clear as I would like it to be.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Exactly. QM agrees with experiment. Local hidden variables don't. It's the job of the mathematician (or a physicist wearing his mathematics hat) to develop the proper formalism.

[whattajoke]

I enjoyed the layman explanation. Especially the summation!

S: These long-range correlations trouble me. Pass the hemlock.

That sums up my college physics experience (which contained nothing even close to the level of Bell's Inequality) very well!