I have been noticing that many people don't have a clear understanding of what Schrödinger's cat is and tend to use it as a vey bad analogy for the polar nature of two options. While I understand that many people will never really need to know what it is all about, but if this is the case, they should never be using it for an analogy without understanding the theoretical concept.
I got the idea for this from something that my little sister said to me, which I found incredibly funny because she's telling me what Schrödinger's cat is all about and I'm the one studying to be a physicist.
"the idea of Schrödinger's cat is the idea that something can exist in both forms until you explore the options" - My little sister
This is not what Schrödinger's cat is about, this analogy has been dumbed down so far that it loses the essential idea of this theory.
I will begin by explaining what Schrödinger's cat really is -
It is a thought experiment that consists of placing a cat into a box, with an atomic timer that releases a toxin when the element in the timer reaches half-life, when the toxin is released, the cat dies. The point of the atomic timer is to make the time in which the toxin is realised arbitrary, you are not meant to know when the toxin is realised and therefore do not know when the cat has died. This leads to the heart of the theory - you can not observe the cat, you can not observe its state and therefore do not know if it is dead or alive. This is analogous of the state of subatomic particles. Something that many people do not know is that all particles have dual states - they can be observed as waves or particles. In fact you or I can be observed as a particle or a wave, it's just our wavelengths are so long we don't bother observing them consciously, or even experimentally. This concept doesn't only hold true to that of photons/electromagnetic waves.
Returning to that of Schrödinger's cat, the whole point of the experiment is not to open the box and observe the state at which the cat is in. It is to show the idea that once we observe the cat/particle (because the cat is actually an analogy of a particle/wave), it determines the state at which the particle is in. This concept goes on further to one of the many worlds theory - called the wave function collapse, which I will not go into detail because it does not hold much to the idea behind this thread. But it explains that in the way you observe a particle, it determines in which split reality you exist in; one you live in where you observed it as a wave, the other you observe it as a particle.
So, for all of you who thought that Schrödinger's cat is about something existing in both forms until you open the box and explore the options - your thinking is erroneous. Schrodinger's cat isn't about exploring the options after opening the box, it is about the uncertainty of the state the cat is in and you deciding which option to explore, before you open the box and therefore determine the state in which the cat is in.