[nyeah]

It has to be a completely ideal box. That's a very extreme condition, so it messes very badly with people's intuition. It can not be a metal box with a cat in it, for example.

"It's a thought experiment" means "we can specify a totally ideal box." It doesn't mean "a finite metal box on a table will actually behave this way."

[quesera]

Schrödinger's Cat was intended to be easily imagined, but also obviously ridiculous.

I think that ends up confusing people a lot of people who can relate to the scenario, but don't understand that Schrödinger was accentuating the absurdity of the concept of superposition.

I really think that if the Cat was not a Cat, and if the binary was something other than the accessible-but-complicated concept of alive/dead, the thought experiment would be more useful to those of us who were not in the original messageboard threads between Schrödinger and Einstein.

[ahazred8ta]

This. Schrödinger's opinion was that the superposition collapses at the very beginning when the geiger counter goes 'click', after which everything behaves normally.