After forty years of EPR experiments, it appears on the face of the experimental facts that one of the oldest ideas in Physics has been falsified, namely the retarded interaction paradigm, the notion that long range interactions between quanta, or equivalently causal influences between point events, are mediated by physical entities - fields, particles or “causal influences” in general - that travel through space from one point to the other at or below the characteristic velocity, c. A critical examination of this basic idea shows it to be unsatisfactory in all respects. An alternative is then proposed that satisfies both causality and local action, “distributed action”, which is germane to local realist field models of the quanta, where matter and energy extend in space and interact locally and causally at all locations where they overlap. Bell Inequalities cannot be derived in this context because, with distributed fieldfield interactions, spacelike separation of events does not guarantee the fundamental “no influence” assumption from which all the various Bell Inequalities are derived. Distributed action thus explains what appears to us as instantaneous action at a distance.
PACS: 03.65.Ud 03.75.-b