benelliott comments on Explained: Gödel's theorem and the Banach-Tarski Paradox - Less Wrong Discussion
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Roughly speaking the problem is that mathematicians cannot come up with a meaningful definition of volume that applies to all sets of points (when I say cannot, I mean literally impossible, not just that they tried really hard then gave up). Instead, we have a definition that applies to a very large collection of sets of points, but not all of them.
Sets from that collection have a well defined volume, and any transformation which always leaves this unchanged is called volume preserving.
Sets from outside it, which the sets in the Banach Tarski paradox are, don't have a defined volume at all, and thus can interact with volume-preserving transformations in all sorts of weird ways.