Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic contrasts the actual meaning of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment with how most people understand it. The top panel, labeled "What 'Schrodinger's Cat' means," shows a professorial figure accurately describing the thought experiment: a cat in a box with poison, a radiation emitter, and a Geiger counter, where the Copenhagen interpretation says the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until observed. Crucially, the professor concludes that this is "of course, absurd" and therefore "the interpretation must be wrong" -- which was indeed Schrodinger's original point. He devised the thought experiment as a reductio ad absurdum to highlight what he saw as a flaw in the Copenhagen interpretation.

The bottom panel, labeled "What people think it means," shows a casual guy excitedly summarizing it as: "So there's this cat in a box and hey maybe it's dead, but who knows?! SCIENCE!" This captures how the thought experiment has been stripped of its critical purpose in popular culture and is instead treated as a fun, mind-bending factoid celebrating quantum weirdness -- the exact opposite of Schrodinger's intent.