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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.

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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.

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