If you don't like my use of the term quantity then blame the EPR paper, that is what the authors used.
I agree but that's neither here nor there to the argument.
In the 1970's people tried explaining entanglement along your sort of simplified lines but a scientist called John Archibald Wheeler was the first to realize that assumption could be tested versus what QM mathematics says
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler's_delayed_choice_experiment
Wheelers experiment was first done in 1984 and has been confirmed over and over again.
Having that background the question we as scientist wondered was how fundamental was entanglement and so it was obvious to extend the delayed choice to entanglement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraserThe problem you face Bill is spelt out loud and clear
This delayed choice quantum eraser experiment raises questions about time, time sequences, and thereby brings our usual ideas of time and causal sequence into question.
Your simplification assumes direct timed/causality that particle A and B are entangled because they are conserving something.
Yet in delayed choice erasure experiments we can change what they conserved according to your idea with full retrocausality.
Then just recently your problems got even worse because now your conserving something between one particle and a particle in the future that doesn't exist yet and won't exist until the current particles is long since dead
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/05/physicists-create-quantum-link-b.htmlI can assure you that the next step that is obvious will be being worked on right now which is to do a quantum erasure on time separated entangled particles and that is like your worst nightmare because it would show entanglement retrocausality between two entities that never exist at the same time.
What I am explicitly showing you is QM operates outside time and entanglement has nothing to do with conservation and to push that view is wrong and misleading.
Conservation in QM is covered a totally different way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energyLook carefully at Emmy Noether's mathematics and theorem which expresses it the best science has to offer.
Note the discussion of potential energy
Conversely, systems which are not invariant under shifts in time (an example, systems with time dependent potential energy) do not exhibit conservation of energy – unless we consider them to exchange energy with another, external system so that the theory of the enlarged system becomes time invariant again. Since any time-varying system can be embedded within a larger time-invariant system, conservation can always be recovered by a suitable re-definition of what energy is. Conservation of energy for finite systems is valid in such physical theories as special relativity and quantum theory (including QED) in the flat space-time.
What we as QM scientists are saying to you is that QM is much very similar to potential energy and why we are extremely certain that QM is part of the underlying fabric of space because if you don't embed it in the larger universe system we could violate conservation of energy.
So conservation is already guaranteed within modern QM so there is no reason to think entanglement has anything to do with conservation especially in view of time separated entanglement.
Moreover in realizing that QM guarantees conservation of energy it resolves many of retrocasaulity paradoxes. For example the grandfather paradox resolves because you are here you can't go back in time and kill your grandfather because his sperm is required to create your father (conservation law) so killing your grandfather erases you or QM conspires so you can't kill your grandfather, no way without trying to work out which but it will resolve one way or the other under QM.
