Drop a penny right now and I can tell you how fast it fell.  It’s not because I’m a clairvoyant who can see you from afar and measure the speed of the penny with my mind; it’s because the force of gravity at the surface of the earth is relatively invariant.  Quantum states are invariant in a similar way.

Instead of thinking about entanglement in terms of FTL “communication” between the particles (which is what makes it seem so weird) think of it like this:

I have a single cookie and I show it to you.  I break it into two pieces without you seeing how big the pieces are, then I put one piece in a box and give it to you.  You take it 500 miles away from me and then open the box.  Now you know not only how much cookie you have but how much cookie I kept for myself even though you’re 500 miles away and can’t see my piece of cookie.

It’s a loose analogy because cookies are not quantum mechanical systems but it’s a better way to approach the problem than the “communication” model.

Contrast with Newton’s law of gravity: the force of gravity is explained by Newton’s law, but it’s still not really clear why there is such a thing as that force — except that it follows from a law that seems to be true. Entanglement is confusing because it’s counterintuitive, whereas gravity doesn’t seem confusing because it’s really intuitive (it has to be for us to navigate the surface of the earth). But apart from the idiosyncrasies of human intuition they’re completely analogous scenarios.

The LHC is the only experiment that can approximate conditions just after the Big Bang and  surely this is a subject of great interest to both physicists and people around the world.

Moreover – and I’m happy to sound very naive here – are we anywhere close to EXPLAINING quantum entanglement in terms that sound remotely sane and comprehensible, to a layman?