I was excited and delighted to hear that the 2022 Nobel prize went to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, for their ground-breaking experiments on entangled photons.
“We learnt nothing new”
The experiments confirmed the predictions of quantum theory. There is no rival theory and quantum theory is confirmed a million times a day all round the world.
We did learn something new with the theoretical work of John Bell. He is dead so he does not get the prize. (lesson: to receive the ultimate prize you need to live to old age). John Bell proved that the predictions of quantum theory with entangled photons could not be reproduced with any classical explanation. Aspect et al performed those experiemnts. The wikipedia article on CHSH is a good resource
The experiments confirmed quantum theory. So they not only confirmed that quantum theory was correct, but in doing so they showed, that no reasonable explanation of the quantum world is possible. Technically they ruled out local hidden variable theories. That is a big result, Really big. In all the rest of science probabilities are just a way of averaging over details that we don’t know. We don’t know the order of cards in the pack, nor the exact forces when we toss a dice so we use probabilities. Quantum theory can’t be like that. Until John Bell produced his theoretical result it was an open question whether a deeper classical theory could explain the probabilities of quantum theory. Hence Einstein said “God does not play dice.”, but it seems as if God does.
My explanation
If we ever explain quantum theory, then the explanation will be strange. Many scientists think no explanation is needed or possible. It is a tragedy that such views were so strong that the normal scientific quest for understanding was quashed.
To explain quantum theory you need a mechanism for context dependence. We already have a theory that can do it. General relativity allows acausal effects. Conventionally such solutions are considered unphysical and discarded. In fact they should be embraced as I have done.