I don't completely understand why myself
I do. I also think I understand the disconnect between what you are describing and how you are misunderstanding it. First some sources so that you don't have to just take my word for it:
"In Section 5.2 we derived the redshift of photon wavelengths in a rather heuristic manner. In this section, a rigorous general relativistic interpretation will be given.
The key property of light propagation is that it obeys
ds=0 (A2.2)
That is to say,
a light ray travels no distance at all in space-time. At a given time all points in space are equivalent...Remember that the
spatial coordinates in the metric are comoving,
so galaxies remain at fixed coordinates; the expansion is entirely taken care of by the scale factor a(t)...
In an expanding Universe, a(tr ) > a(te), so dtr > dte.
The time interval between the two rays increases as the Universe expands." (emphasis added)
Liddle, A. (2003).
An Introduction to Modern Cosmology (2nd Ed.). Wiley.
"We have seen in the introduction that galaxies are moving away from each other...
This phenomenon is easier to understand if we imagine a two-dimensional world instead of our three-dimensional one. A two-dimensional world corresponds to a surface, and all physical objects (and creatures) in this surface possess a width and a length, but no height. Creatures in this surface can move only inside the surface, they measure distances inside the surface and cannot even imagine a third dimension...
Let us now imagine a surface in the form of a sphere, which represents the Universe of the two-dimensional creatures. For us, this conception poses no difficulties at all; it is, however, not conceivable for the two-dimensional creatures! In addition,
we imagine that this surface is expanding, as in Fig. 2.1.
This behavior corresponds to that of our three-dimensional Universe: now, all distances between points (or galaxies) on this surface of the sphere are increasing" (emphasis added)
Ellwanger, U. (2012).
From the Universe to the Elementary Particles. A First Introduction to Cosmology and the Fundamental Interactions. Springer.
"How then can a “cosmic redshift” occur in the universe, where there is so much empty space and so few atoms to regulate the temperature? The origin of the cosmic cooling is a little bit like the Doppler effect we encountered earlier for waves emitted by moving sources. We see those waves “stretched” in wavelength as the source is moving away from us. A similar thing happens to a solitary wave travelling through an expanding space—the distance between crest and valley in the wave becomes stretched, the wavelength longer, the more the space expands. And if the space has expanded by a factor thousand since the emission of the cosmic light, the frequency of the light has decreased by this factor and the wavelength increased.
So the cosmic redshift does not tell us that the source of the radiation is locally moving, but rather that the space through which it travels is expanding." (emphasis added)
Satz, H. (2013).
Ultimate Horizons: Probing the Limits of the Universe. Springer.
In short, the "stretching" of spacetime due to expansion affects how we observe light that has been emitted from stars (the wavelengths lengthen, the "redshift" effect).
In that relatively small gap, we're able to observe galaxies at actual superluminal speeds.
We don't. This would violate special relativity. If a galaxy moved even close to the speed of light, Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence (E=mc^2, at least in the most popular form of the equation) would tell us that the mass of the galaxies would approach infinity, and would actually BE INFINITE if they actually reached the speed of light, let alone surpassed it. Instead what we observe is evidence that the distance between galaxies is increasing faster than the speed of light.
And there's the rub. The long ascendant Transactional Interpretation, accounts for all quantum weirdness, explains the EPR paradox and entanglement. The objection to it has been mainly that having transactions taking place both forward and backward in time is just counter-intuitive.
It's not a matter of it being counterintuitive. Nonlocality is counterintuitive. The logic of quantum experiments is counterintuitive. Higher dimensional spaces with non-Euclidean geometries are counterintuitive. The issue with the TI is that fixes one seeming paradox by introducing a more problematic one.
"We need not artificially construct a theory along these lines since proposals with such backwards causal influences have already been developed. We will take as a clinical example the
transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics due to John Cramer, which postulates that quantum events are determined by the interaction of wave-functions that propagate both forward and backward in time...Cramer postulates that not only does an emitter send a wave-function forward in time to an absorber, but the absorber sends one backward in time to the emitter. The state of the absorber (for example, the orientation of a polarizer) thereby influences the emission event, allowing the production only of photons in appropriate definite states of polarization.
Cramer uses this mechanism to explain how the quantum correlations can be produced at space-like separation
The price to be paid in any such theory is the acceptance of explicit backwards causation, effects which precede their causes in every frame of reference." (emphasis added)
Maudlin, T. (2011).
Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics (3rd Ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
Every interpretation of QM, according to its proponents, solves all of the problems. The Bohmian theory of quantum physics is a realist interpretation that is mathematically consistent and has its proponents claiming that it resolves the EPR paradox and even restores determinism, while detractors point out that it his highly nonlocal and only works because of a more-or-less
ad hoc insertion of a new ontological entity (the "pilot wave") which guides point-like particles according to the dynamical laws of quantum mechanics. Everettians argue that they have solved the measurement problem, EPR, etc., because the wavefunction never in fact collapses, while detractors point out that this picture can't explain why particular outcomes are more likely in particular bases (in particular "universes" or "branches").
But Ruth Kastner, in her recent book, Understanding Our Unseen Realities: Solving Quantum Riddles, among other things, addressed the intuitive problem by referring the transactions taking place not backward and forward in time, but outside of time.
I've spoken with Kastner, and while I am not that big a fan of her new book (it's a popular text), I did like here more technical monograph on the same subject:
Kastner, R. E. (2013).
The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: The Reality of Possibility. Cambridge University Press.
However, her account is no more free of problems than was Cramer's original TI or any other interpretation of QM. To quote just one critic as an example:
"according to Kastner the transaction between the source and the R-apparatus is supposed to exist in all runs of that experiment. Yet, this transaction alone cannot appropriately determine the probability distribution of the complete pair-state at the source. The distribution of the complete pair-state should also depend on the setting of the L-apparatus. But the probability distribution of the possible L-settings depends on the probability distribution of the complete pair-state at the source. So we are back to square one.
Finally, it is noteworthy that there is an important difference between the transactional interpretation and the indeterministic Bell-like retro-causal models we considered in 5.2 and 7. In the latter the probabilities of measurement outcomes are fundamentally factorizable, whereas in the former they are not."
Berkovitz, J. (2008). On predictions in retro-causal interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics,
39(4), 709-735.
I think at least part of the problem we've been having is the different interpretations we're using.
I'm not using any single interpretation, but I did point out I disagree with the standard treatment of QM as an irreducibly statistical framework for predicting the outcomes of experiments. I believe, like Kastner, Cramer, Bohm, and many, many others that quantum mechanics and quantum physics more generally does somehow describe physical systems. However, even if I were a die-hard TI proponent, I still wouldn't believe (and neither do proponents of the TI) that entanglement doesn't occur in the space of our experience or at least within spacetime. The TI
absolutely rejects such a view, because it is fundamentally a realist interpretation.
I think you are probably referring to Kastner's "pre-spacetime", "possibilist transactional interpretation" in which a causally efficacious "possibility space" of sorts accounts for the statistical structure of quantum mechanics by imposing this structure on here pre-spacetime "realm". However, even in this interpretation, entanglement happens in our 3D or 4D reality (which depends on one's ontological interpretation of spacetime structure and dimensionality). I've scanned two passages of import because the bra's and ket's are not easy to reproduce:
Not in particular that the
actual outcome of a nonlocal relationship (i.e., the instantaneous influence on a space-like separated system exerted by the a measured system entangled with it) doesn't even factor into the causally backwards-propagating "wave", and the "waves" that travel forwards and backwards in violation of causality nonetheless are physically real processes happening in the universe we experience. In fact, they're even more problematic because Kastner seeks a kind of melding of Bohr's antirealistic, statistical interpretation and a realist one, yielding physically real possibilities: "OW and CW are interpreted ontologically in PTI as
physically real possibilities." (italics in original)
But entanglement has not just been observed
I'm not contesting that entanglement occurs. I know it does. I'm contesting your description of it.
The thing is, word's like instantaneous have no meaning in a timeless environment.
They have meaning in the TI, they have no global meaning in relativistic physics, and there is no physics in which they have no meaning locally as everything in physics is described via coordinate spaces (even things that don't exist and spaces that don't exist) and those things that are held to be "real" or to actually happen take place in some space in which either time is a coordinate, more than one coordinate, or intrinsic to the realized space. Entanglement happens "in time", as does the whole of quantum mechanics (why do you think the Schrödinger equation is a differential equation?).
