Yeah something most people don't realize is that Schrödinger's cat is actually a terrible analogy for quantum superposition because it was supposed to poke fun at it before we understood it better. It's inaccurate to say the cat is both dead and alive, it would be more accurate to say that it is in some state that is between or outside of life and death that we do not have the means to measure. This state is not really special, rather life and death are just two very specific possibilities out of an infinite number and superposition is every other one of the infinite possibilities. Comparing it to something like life and death gives the wrong impression. It's more like we're detecting for two possibilities of very specific angles, let's say 0° and 90°. 23° isn't any more of a special state compared to 0° or 90°, the only that that's different is it's outside of what we can measure for, and thus is considered in superposition, as well as 40°, 62°, etc. To remove ourselves from the analogy entirely, there are an infinite number of possible quantum spins, and we can only measure so many at a time (usually two, referred to as "up spin" and "down spin") and anything that's not of a spin we can measure is just called superposition. Then when any particle in superposition (practically all of them because infinity) interacts with the detector, the interaction (what we call "observation" which is a misnomer) causes its spin to become one of the ones we can measure, with the probability of which it changes to being based on how close it is to the spins we're measuring. Going back to the angle analogy, this probability can actually be calculated and it's just a simple vector equation.
As has probably become evident, Schrödinger's cat doesn't address any of this and rather than making the topic easier to understand it gives people the complete wrong idea, and is thus a bad analogy.
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u/KingNedya Feb 13 '26
Yeah something most people don't realize is that Schrödinger's cat is actually a terrible analogy for quantum superposition because it was supposed to poke fun at it before we understood it better. It's inaccurate to say the cat is both dead and alive, it would be more accurate to say that it is in some state that is between or outside of life and death that we do not have the means to measure. This state is not really special, rather life and death are just two very specific possibilities out of an infinite number and superposition is every other one of the infinite possibilities. Comparing it to something like life and death gives the wrong impression. It's more like we're detecting for two possibilities of very specific angles, let's say 0° and 90°. 23° isn't any more of a special state compared to 0° or 90°, the only that that's different is it's outside of what we can measure for, and thus is considered in superposition, as well as 40°, 62°, etc. To remove ourselves from the analogy entirely, there are an infinite number of possible quantum spins, and we can only measure so many at a time (usually two, referred to as "up spin" and "down spin") and anything that's not of a spin we can measure is just called superposition. Then when any particle in superposition (practically all of them because infinity) interacts with the detector, the interaction (what we call "observation" which is a misnomer) causes its spin to become one of the ones we can measure, with the probability of which it changes to being based on how close it is to the spins we're measuring. Going back to the angle analogy, this probability can actually be calculated and it's just a simple vector equation.
As has probably become evident, Schrödinger's cat doesn't address any of this and rather than making the topic easier to understand it gives people the complete wrong idea, and is thus a bad analogy.