How long can a Wavefunction exist for?

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And can a collapsed wavefunction be retreived?
 
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Once the wave function has collapsed, it is gone, and the hisotry of the particle begins anew from whatever physical state the previous wave collapsed to.

There is no natural lifetime for a wave function. They are conceived as going along until something causes a collapse. This is all assuming the wave function is something physical, which is a doubtful assumption.
 
You might as well ask how long is a piece of string?

Actually saying that in GRW there is a finite proabilty of a wavefunction collapsing into a localized stae at any time, but GRW theory's hardly popular, mainly due to the fact that experimental evidence seems to disagree with it.
 
Insights auto threads is broken atm, so I'm manually creating these for new Insight articles. Towards the end of the first lecture for the Qiskit Global Summer School 2025, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Olivia Lanes (Global Lead, Content and Education IBM) stated... Source: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/quantum-entanglement-is-a-kinematic-fact-not-a-dynamical-effect/ by @RUTA
If we release an electron around a positively charged sphere, the initial state of electron is a linear combination of Hydrogen-like states. According to quantum mechanics, evolution of time would not change this initial state because the potential is time independent. However, classically we expect the electron to collide with the sphere. So, it seems that the quantum and classics predict different behaviours!
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