Schrödinger invented the cat to mock an interpretation, not to celebrate it: he found it absurd to scale an atom’s superposition up to the size of an animal. Before measurement the system carries both possibilities with amplitudes α and β, and the two probabilities |α|² and |β|² always sum to exactly 1. Measurement collapses the state to a single outcome, but the surrounding environment does the very same thing with nobody watching, and decoherence is the modern resolution of the cat paradox.
Schrödinger invented the cat to mock an interpretation, not to celebrate it: he found it absurd to scale an atom’s superposition up to the size of an animal. Before measurement the system carries both possibilities with amplitudes α and β, and the two probabilities |α|² and |β|² always sum to exactly 1. Measurement collapses the state to a single outcome, but the surrounding environment does the very same thing with nobody watching, and decoherence is the modern resolution of the cat paradox.
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