The “para” in “paradox” means “meta”. The original meaning of the word “paradox” is

an error due to mixing language levels—-the object level and the meta level.

However, people have misused the word “paradox” a lot, using it to label anything unexpected. For example, in quantum mechanics, there are many so-called “paradoxes” that may be not really paradoxes.

However, among those quantum mechanics “paradoxes”, some of them are really paradoxes, whose existences are really due to mixing the object time level and the meta-time level.

The time within a story is called the “object time”. The time of the story’s writer or reader is called the “meta-time”.

The physical time in which an experiment is conducted is the object time. The time in which an experiment is designed is the meta-time. The meta-time of an experiment is its designer’s time level.

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“Wave function collapse” is not a physical process. Instead, it is mathematical. It just means that we have to replace the wave function with another if we replace the system with another.

In other words, it is not a physical event that happens during the operation of the experiment. Instead, it “happens” when you replace one experiment design with another. In this sense, “wave function collapse” happens not in the experiment’s time, but in the experiment’s meta-time, the time level of the experiment designer.

wave function collapse

~ probability distribution change (replacement) due to replacing “the experiment without measurement device” with “the experiment with measuring device“ (for a particular physical variable)

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The common quantum mechanics “paradoxes” are induced by 4 main misunderstandings.

1.  A wave function is of a particle. Wrong.

Instead, it is of the system (the experiment setup). It is of a variable of the physical system.

Actually, a system has more than one wave functions. Each physical variable of that system has its own wave function.

2.1  A system's wave function exists in physical spacetime. Wrong.

Instead, the wave function exists in the mathematical abstract space. With respect to an individual physical variable, different physical systems give different probability distributions, which are encoded in different wave functions.

So a wave function (for a particular variable) is an intrinsic property of a system. It is a mathematical property, not a physical state, of the physical system (the experimental setup). It does not evolve in time.

In a sense, you cannot change a wave function; you can only replace it with another by replacing the physical system with another.

— Me@2022-02-19 04:21:38 PM

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2022.02.19 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK