Is Schrodinger's cat really about a cat being alive and dead

[Cameron83]

The honest answer is that Schrodinger actually proposed this thought experiment specifically to mock and criticize a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, not to seriously argue that cats can literally exist in two states simultaneously. He was pointing out that if you take a certain reading of quantum theory and scale it up naively to an everyday object, you get an obviously absurd result, which he intended as a criticism of that interpretation rather than a genuine prediction about cats.

The actual setup involves a sealed box containing a cat, a radioactive atom with a fifty percent chance of decaying within a set time, and a mechanism that releases poison gas if that decay is detected. Under one specific interpretation of quantum mechanics popular at the time, the atom exists in a superposition of decayed and not decayed until observed, and Schrodinger's whole point was that this logic, if applied consistently, would absurdly imply the cat is also somehow in an equivalent superposition of alive and dead.

Schrodinger himself considered this a reductio ad absurdum. A deliberately over the top example specifically meant to demonstrate that the interpretation being popular at the time had a genuine problem when it came to explaining how strange quantum effects actually connect to the ordinary macroscopic world we observe every day.

Modern physics has actually made real progress on this exact question since Schrodinger's era. A field called decoherence explains how quantum superposition rapidly and effectively breaks down through interaction with a surrounding environment, which is precisely why we do not observe genuinely large scale objects like cats behaving in any kind of quantum superposition in real everyday life.

So the honest short version is the thought experiment was a deliberate joke pointing out an absurd sounding implication. Not a serious claim about cats, and the actual physics has moved forward considerably since Schrodinger first posed it back in 1935

[Finley_19]

Reckon few people who casually reference this thought experiment actually know it was originally meant as a specific criticism rather than a genuine straight description.

That context has almost completely been lost somewhere along the way

[PlanckLimit81]

Short version, it was a deliberate joke pointing out a problem.

Not a real serious claim, and decoherence is the actual modern physics answer to why cats stay firmly either alive or dead in reality

[Cass93]

Leans toward being true that is such a clean and clearly great example of how a nuanced scientific point gets flattened and distorted once it becomes a widely repeated pop culture reference completely divorced from its real original context. Held up well

[Molly76]

Strikes me that see decoherence get its own proper dedicated explainer thread on this board feels like the quite more interesting and important actual physics that this whole cat story tends to completely overshadow. Good to know

[Shane95]

Decoherence is actually such an underrated piece of physics that barely anyone outside the actual field talks about. It is the real actual answer to why we do not see macroscopic quantum weirdness in ordinary everyday life, and it deserves way more general public attention than it currently gets

[Policy Cipher]

Building on this, this thought experiment gets used so much in pop culture specifically because alive and dead makes for a really much better and punchier headline than the more accurate but far more boring decayed and not decayed radioactive atom.

Good to know

[ElectricCanopy]

The reductio ad absurdum framing is the single most important context missing from almost every popular retelling of this thought experiment.

It gets presented constantly as if it were a straight description of real quantum weirdness rather than the pointed joke it was actually intended to be

[NWO]

For what it's worth, learning the actual full context was that it made Schrodinger seem a lot funnier and sharper than the usual pop culture version of this story ever gives him credit for being. Small but real point

[GateWalker31]

TLDR, Schrodinger meant this as a criticism showing an absurd implication of a specific interpretation. Not as a genuine serious claim that cats can actually be alive and dead simultaneously