More Proof Quantum Mechanics is Spooky

I hope someone can explain this to me. The Economist wrote Quantum physics and reality, I'm not looking, honest! and Science News wrote 'Spooky Action At A Distance' Of Quantum Mechanics Directly Observed.

if a particle and anti-particle collide, they annihilate each other. Hardy's paradox is that they might not if the interaction isn't observed. Basically if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, did it really fall?

"This week Kazuhiro Yokota of Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues demonstrated that Hardy’s paradox is, in fact, correct. They report their work in the New Journal of Physics. The experiment represents independent confirmation of a similar demonstration by Jeff Lundeen and Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto, which was published seven weeks ago in Physical Review Letters."

Both groups used quantum entangled photons, "In this version, two photons were used instead of a positron and an electron and relied not upon non-annihilation but on polarization degrees of freedom values measured."

They uses a technique known as weak measurement which gives some information but not all and doesn't disturb the particles. "Dr Yokota (and also Drs Lundeen and Steinberg) managed to observe them without looking, as it were, by not gathering enough information from any one interaction to draw a conclusion, and then pooling these partial results so that the total became meaningful."

At first read, this reminded me of AAA rated financial derivatives based on bad mortgages, but that's probably just because of what I've been reading lately. :)

The Economist wrote: "Not disturbing it is the quantum-mechanical equivalent of not really looking. So they were able to show that the universe does indeed exist when it is not being observed."

"What the several researchers found was that there were more photons in some places than there should have been and fewer in others. The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. Fewer than zero particles being present usually means that you have antiparticles instead. But there is no such thing as an antiphoton (photons are their own antiparticles, and are pure energy in any case), so that cannot apply here. The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s."

Here's the researcher's own description from their abstract, "Unlike Hardy's original argument in which the contradiction is inferred by retrodiction, our experiment reveals its paradoxical nature as preposterous values actually read out from the meter. Such a direct observation of a paradox gives us new insights into the spooky action of quantum mechanics."