Can the Schrödinger's cat be used to disprove the existence of anything we cannot sense?

Question

Self explanatory. Does quantum physics apply in real life?

Answer 1

No. Schrödinger used the cat only as an analogy to try to explain quantum physics. Subatomic particles exist in indeterminate states because they are only wave functions until they interact with another particle. You *can* apply the uncertainty principle to cats and other macroscopic objects, but the magnitude of the uncertainty is infinitesimal. Quantum physics only comes into play at scales where the uncertainty is significant.

Answer 2

Sometimes the whole "observer effect" is taken too literally by philosophers, as implying that there has to be a thinking agent observing reality in order to make the wavefunction collapse into any discrete state. There's two major problems with this:

1) The "observer" doesn't need to be conscious. Anything that would be affected by an outcome, such as a neighboring atom, is good enough.

2) Schrodinger's Cat was actually devised as a thought experiment to try to show Quantum Mechanics was silly and stupid. Of course, not only is the cat a valid observer for collapsing the wavefunction, but the vial of prussic acid used to poison the cat is also an observer, since it is either shattered or not shattered depending on whether the atom decays.

Anyway, quantum wavefunctions collapse as soon as something interacts with the particle in question. Schrodinger's cat is at best a metaphor, where the cat half-living/half-dead stands in for an atom that may or may not have decayed. Because our intuition doesn't really function at such small scales, we have to rely on analogy, but all analogies break when you push them too far.