It seems you have many misconceptions, I will try to clear up a few ones.
Showing intentional entanglement of pairs of things at greater and greater distances is not the same thing
This is not the only thing we have tested or discovered. You know, our very existence relies on this non-local phenomena, actually. We are moving about 2.2 million kilometers per hour, or 611 kilometers per second, about 0.2% the constant speed of travel/time, actually. We are moving into the gravitational barycenter on the Laniakea Supercluster.
Without non-locality awareness, or entanglement, when the particles in your body are trying to send energy to other particles in your body, they would miss the shot: all the energy=temperature in your body would just fly away in a few seconds. However, particle A knows where particle B is, instantly, and thus knows exactly where to send particle C to transmit the energy transfer correctly.
This is entanglement. And we have verified this multiple times in multiple settings. It is just universal awareness that is time/distance invariant = instant, at least as far as the level of detail of our experiments allows.
And using the "law of conservation of energy" to support that hypothesis really falls flat, because different inertial frames of reference do not agree on energy levels of various entities visible to both.
The law of conservation of energy is a symmetry that only applies when the amount of space stays statically. The reason why two different frames of reference can disagree on the energy content is due to the expansion of space, thus breaking this symmetry. On a fixed amount of space, three observers would be able to triangle their reference frames to always get the exact energy amount, that remains fully preserved.
Quantum systems actually respect this law and have full awareness of the energy content of other particles, and thus knows beforehand the amount of energy to send in an interaction through a 3rd particle. No interaction can happen or be sent that would break this law in some way, space expansion aside.
I sometimes try to consider the frame of reference of a photon, which, travelling at the speed of light, does not seem to have "time". We do see that things like beams of electrons travelling at near the speed of light do not seem to disperse as would be expected without relativistic time dilation.
Photons does not have time since their internal wave-particle functioning is distance/time invariant. They do not age nor decay, nor split nor anything. They forever remain the same, other than space expansion stretching them. Things with time can interact with them, however, and produce timed results, until the photon is emitted again, becoming timeless again until its eventual next interaction.
All other particles (aside gluons) spins with themselves or have some other properties that scale with c in some way (that is not instant). The reason this interaction with c exists is due to the mass conferred by the Higgs field, which produces an innate resistance to c. The innate fields themselves also have no time, only their "vibrations" or "shape changes" does have time, all at c.
So, I sometimes wonder if our use of "entanglement" is just a alternative crutch to get around our lack of detailed physical understanding of time, itself.
We have a detailed physical understanding of time. However this goes with an assumption: our time, the way things made of hadrons (which are protons and neutrons, made of three quarks each) experience and work with time. Your neurons for example experience time at the pace c sends particle interactions between all the particles in your cells and between cells, all atoms = hadrons. General Relativity does a good work at explaining what happens if something starts pulling away particles so they start traveling slower than c toward their objectives (which they are always aware, instantly, thanks to entanglement, of where they need to go): nothing, for us, and we slow down to the rest not sharing the same pulling away.
So time, in the scientific (and it is scientific since it is empirically testable) way, is just the pacing at which hadrons and stuff that interacts with hadrons works. I know it is frustratingly philosophically, as in the search for the "beyond the big bang" sort of frustration, but we simply cannot know that, lol, we just know the time WE experience and the time WE work with, and we, and all our instruments, are made of hadrons, so yeah. It doesn't explains what c is, just that c exists and is what it is, and we operate at c, and the things affecting c (anything that can push or pull particles toward a direction, aka gravity).
without any real understanding of why it is actually happening.
Dark Energy: We do not know what it is, hence the dark, however we do understand some of the things related to it. We know it is repulsive or negative gravity, since what we are observing in your universe is: space with gravity is not expanding, space distanced from matter is having way less gravity it should have toward small objects we can observe nearby, and it is constantly losing strength as we approach the present, compared to the past, so something is doing "gravity subtraction", then, if you keep moving away, you will see points in space that have NO gravity that still has matter = they should have gravity proportional to it, but they are not doing so, so there is a specific distance where gravity is fully canceled out, that keeps getting closer to galaxies as we approach the present.
Finally, there is a point in space where just all objects not gravitationally bound start distancing from each other proportional to their distance, and we call this phenomenon expansion of space, as it behaves exactly like the stretching of space caused by gravity, but just in the literal inverse.
Yeah, we do not know "why" it is actually happening, but the universe does not care for our human why neither, it just does its thing. We know this thing exists, though, and have some rough ideas of its properties, so it is not fully "dark", probably the most "dark" and puzzling thing about this is that, at least as hypothesis, it should be present in all space, yet we have not detected it yet (though we also know its negative gravitational effect is very close to plank scales to start with, so we have a long way to improve in our detectors before hoping to detect it).
The other alternative is that it is some sort of quantum particle that is produced by a yet-to-discover field, that only happens when there is a sufficient accumulation of gravitationally low-dense space. Chances are we won't be able to clear up this point anytime soon until we travel outside the galaxy, or at least in minimum we can setup a good laboratory outside the solar system and pray that amount of empty is enough.
Dark Matter: This one is more conventional. There is stuff out there causing gravity pull in galaxies, dominant on the space between stars (the barycenters of gravity between stars is oddly more centered than it should be between unequal massive stars), but also existing in some amount in star systems. Since most the empty space is on the border of galaxies, that is where this invisible gravity pull is the stronger at, but we can also see some of its effect in creating black holes, specially on the galactic centers.
Yes we do not know what this invisible thing is, but it is likely something very conventional and boring that is just low interacting like neutrinos, or merely there is way more dead stars, planets and gas and regular matter out there in the interstellar medium than we can see with telescopes from here. There is many possibilities really, but it is very unlikely to be significantly beyond our current knowledge of Physics too.
Inflation: This one is more of an hypothesis than anything. It is the only hypothesis we have so far that explains the Cosmic Microwave Background, the characteristics of the observable universe and its age (based on c and the light that reaches us), among other empirical observations. However, it is just that, a hypothesis. It is used in the Lambda (Cosmological Constant)-Cold Dark Matter astronomical model, the standard for astronomy, but just because it is useful and practical for astronomers, nobody really believes this model is reality itself, but at the lack of better hypothesis and theories that are practical to use by professionals not studying 30 years of math, it will continue to be used. It is flexible and uses only moderately complicated maths at most.
We actually know it is factually wrong actually as there is evidence against this model, and have been for 50 years. What we know however is that whatever the reality is, must be kinda similar, yes, so even if Inflation is wrong, it is not wrong enough to not be worth using, just like classical physics are wrong, but not wrong enough to not be used to build rockets and stuff.
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