Takes Two to Tangle

Can you explain quantum entanglement to me like Iโ€™m 5 years old?

The most upvoted comment is 100% wrong. That is not how entanglement works at all, at all.

Those two particles are in a superposition. Itโ€™s nothing โ€” nothing even close โ€” to the blue marble and red marble example. The state of the particles (or anything else in quantum entanglement) simply does not exist* until one of the pair is examined. Note that this is not me speculating. A Nobel Prize recently got handed out for demonstrating facts directly related to what Iโ€™m talking about here.

What this means is that an entangled spin-up and spin-down electron pair, no matter how far they are separated, do not collapse into their respective spins until one of the pair is examined and it assumes a spin orientation. Then the other instantly does the opposite as well. In the top-voted commenterโ€™s example, one marble is always red and one is always blue. This is completely not the case with entanglement. Entangled unexamined electrons are neither spin-up nor spin-down, but can only be represented by a probability calculation. To be perfectly clear: this is a fact of the universe, this probability, not something we are using due to lack of knowledge. The superposition is a feature of the universe itself, not of math or resulting from lack of understanding.

Itโ€™s ok, though. Iโ€™ve talked to actual physicists who donโ€™t really understand entanglement, so I wouldnโ€™t expect some random Reddit commenter to make sense of it either. Your macro intuitions just do not work at all for anything quantum. Itโ€™s better just to think of it as is, not as we wish it were.

*Other than as a probability inherent to the universe; not probability as we are accustomed to thinking of it, used due to lack of knowledge.