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