Spooky

Source - http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/spooky

See, it's funny because Schrödinger's (the umlaut is important, don't forget it) cat is a famous thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat is placed in a hypothetical box along with a flask of poison, a radioactive source, and some kind of monitor that detects radioactivity. If the monitor detects radioactivity (something that happens with 50% frequency in a certain amount of time), the monitor breaks the flask with the poison, killing the cat. If not, the flask remains unbroken, and the cat lives.

Until the box is opened, however, the cat's fate is unknown, leading to a quantum superposition in which the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened, collapsing the two possibilities into one reality.

It's a thing that shows up in popular culture from time to time, most famously on the AWFUL SERIES The Big Bang Theory.

But here's the deal, yo...

Schrödinger wasn't in favor of the thought experiment. He didn't like it. He was using it to suggest that the idea of quantum superposition was absurd.

From wikipedia...

Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.

...

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naïvely accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

...

(Written by Einstein to Schrödinger) You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.

So, I would imagine that Schrödinger would be appalled that his non-scientific legacy has come down to people knowing him for a theoretical experiment that he came up with in an attempt to point out how ludicrous quantum superpositions are.

And I love the idea that Schrödinger's ghost haunts the world embracing anyone who recognizes that 'his experiment' is ridiculous and stupid.

That was his point.

(Though I would be remiss if I didn't point out that quantum superpositions have turned out probably to be 100% true and real.)