Nonsense. Under the Copenhagen interpretation (which I do not personally subscribe to, but it is a legitimate interpretation and it has its defenders), when one particle interacts with another particle that's in a superposition, the result is that both particles are in an entangled superposition. Cat, Geiger counter and gunpowder can thus all be in an entangled superposition; one can argue that this is absurd, but Einstein also thought that the EPR experiment showed that quantum mechanics was absurd, and actually that result has been experimentally verified.
I never thought of it as something to, uh, <i>prove</i> but more like yet another way to point out the limits of our understanding when it comes to our ability to measure something.
I think of it as driven by thermodynamics - the state is "collapsed" when it's too informationally entangled with the rest of the universe. It's not really "collapse", just our good friend positive entropy.
So does that mean the idea of a "multiverse" is in the same box?<p>Edit: I'll rephrase (I'm serious) - isn't the idea of the multiverse based on the schrodinger's cat in a box idea, and the need for an observer? Or is the whole multiverse idea just sci fi? Or is there another physical basis for the idea of a multiverse?
There is something and there is nothing. We think we are something, but in someone else's view we are nothing.<p>You are the cat inside the box. You exist as a person, live in a planet and the entire setup could and couldn't be real. The experiment prooves that something is uncertain and all these are nonsense.
> as soon as the radioactive atom interacts with the Geiger counter<p>Doesn't the paradox arise precisely because the time at which the atom will interact is probabilistic?
It proved that it was and wasn't an experiment at the same time, and that the experiment's setup was and wasn't detailed enough and you could only know it when you read the teaching material.
I have been mislead about Schroedinger's cat, but now I get the absurdity.
However, I also feel there might be a conceptual mistake in the experiment setup: there -is- a conscious observer present inside of the sealed box: the cat. Thus there is no super-position and therefore the cat will observe itself when it dies (or stays alive), matching later experiments' results.
Science: it works! But Schrodinger's attempt at absurd comedy seems to have failed.