> If it goes one way, the cat lives. If
> it goes the other way, the cat dies.
No, that is wrong. The cat does not live or die. The cat is both alive and dead at the same time. This is why so many people have problems understanding quantum mechanics -- they don't seem to get the implications of a state being a probability. Schrödinger came up with his cat in an attempt to make the reality clear to other people, and yet many intelligent people misinterpret what Schrödinger's point was. It's important to get this right: the cat is both alive and dead. Both. If the scenario wasn't so extremely counter-intuitive, then there would not have been a need to invent it in the first place.
No, that is wrong. The cat is not both alive and dead at the same time. The Schrödinger's cat thought experiment was invented to show the absurdity of the collapse of quantum states being caused by a conscious observer. The collapse of states happens far before the cat dies or survives.
Or if you accept the many-worlds interpretation, there is no collapse. There's one blob of amplitude corresponding to a configuration with a dead cat and you observing a dead cat, and another blob of amplitude corresponding to a configuration with a live cat and you observing a live cat. Excellent explanation with more detail here: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-observation-collapse-probabili....
There's still an event beyond which there appears to be no superposition, whether that's because the two blobs of amplitude have separated enough or whether it's because there's only one left, and I think the word collapse serves well enough.
No, that is wrong. The cat does not live or die. The cat is both alive and dead at the same time. This is why so many people have problems understanding quantum mechanics -- they don't seem to get the implications of a state being a probability. Schrödinger came up with his cat in an attempt to make the reality clear to other people, and yet many intelligent people misinterpret what Schrödinger's point was. It's important to get this right: the cat is both alive and dead. Both. If the scenario wasn't so extremely counter-intuitive, then there would not have been a need to invent it in the first place.