system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Question about the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment

From Wikipedia:
> Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. There is a supposed 50% chance of this happening. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other. 


My question is this:  If the only way to tie a quantum phenomenon to larger world of classical mechanics is to utilize some sort of device (in this particular iteration of the famous though experiment, a radiation monitor) to detect the quantum phenomenon, then why would any interpretation of QM (outside of the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation) imply that the cat would be alive and dead at the same time?  Even under the Copenhagen interpretation, wouldn’t the measurement of the radiation cause the quantum eigenstates to collapse into a single state?  It seems to me that it would not be possible to tie a quantum phenomenon to larger world without first making a measurement, causing the wave function to collapse.  Can anyone tell me what I am missing here?
gpt
The problem is that Schrodinger's cat is a terrible way to illustrate quantum mechanics. All it's trying to demonstrate is that as long as you can not observe something, the particles exist in all possible states. You have to act on a particle in some way to observe it (shoot electrons at it or something), and when that act occurs, the particle has to choose one state.

Schrodinger's cat was developed to show normal people just how ridiculous quantum theory is. It was not developed for people to think long and hard about.