system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If the "common" understanding of Schrödinger's Cat is incorrect, what is the correct way to think about the experiment and its results?

I understand the whole "the cat is both dead and alive" thing, but I've also been told that that interpretation isn't actually correct, and that I wouldn't understand it until I learn more about quantum physics. Does anyone have any insight on the "correct" interpretation of this experiment?
gpt
I view it as a *reductio ad absurdum* showing the pitfalls of the non-rigorous nature of the textbook postulates of quantum mechanics.

A living cat at room temperature is a manifestly classical object. If there are two doorways into a room, the cat does not exist in a superposition of states moving through each door, and the cat does not interfere with itself. 

The problem with textbook quantum mechanics is that it does not provide guidance other than common sense on which objects may be described as quantum objects (atoms, electrons, molecules) which may exist in a superposition of interfering states, and which objects should be treated as classical "detectors" (geiger counters, phosphorescent screens, scientists).

If there is a cat in the box, and a unstable atom that sets off a poison trap if it beta decays, then the sensible way to set up the problem is to treat the atom as a quantum system, and the poison trap as a "detector" which collapses the atomic wavefunction into a state of having decayed or not having decayed.

The absurd way to treat the problem is to look at the atom, the poison trap, and the cat as a quantum system that exists in some superposition of decay (and death of the cat) and no decay (and a living cat) until some other object acts as the "detector" and collapses the wavefunction.

This gets at the heart of the measurement problem: what qualifies something as a detector, and what is the physical process of wavefunction collapse?

I think that recent nanoscale experiments and theoretical work such as the notion of decoherence are making progress towards rigorously understanding wavefunction collapse.