Locality is the idea that things only influence what's near them. Your coffee cools because the air around it is cool, not because of something happening across the planet. To affect something distant, you send a signal, and that signal takes time to arrive. Distance is a real barrier, and everything respects it.
It feels less like a theory than a fact of life, which is exactly why it's hard to give up. Almost everything you've ever observed obeys it. The trouble is that the universe, at its smallest scales, does not. Entangled particles separated by vast distances behave as a single system, with no signal passing between them and no time elapsing.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for experiments confirming this. Reality is, in the physicists' phrase, not "locally real." That doesn't mean you can send messages faster than light — you can't. It means the picture of the world as separate objects nudging their neighbours is, at bottom, incomplete.
For a non-physicist, the unsettling part isn't the math. It's that one of the most basic intuitions you carry — over there is genuinely separate from over here — is something nature only partly honours. The separation you see may be more like a display than a fact.
