I Schrödinger's Cat and radioactive atom

[CoolMint]

Not directly about a cat, but the literature on decoherence is clear about what the requirements are.

If this literature is not peer-reviewed, should it be here?

 

[PeterDonis]

If this literature is not peer-reviewed, should it be here?

The literature on decoherence that I referred to is peer-reviewed. There are peer-reviewed papers on it going back to the 1970s.

 

[gentzen]

But relative to somebody on Jupiter (a box based on isolation by distance instead of true closed system), the cat state is a temporary (15 minutes?) true counterfactual and is thus in superposition. There's an absolute impossibility to measure that superposition from that distance since any measurement will yield results slower than the decoherence occurs relative to him, so there is no pragmatic meaning to asserting the superposition state except as a descriptive demonstration of the interpretation, which seems to be along the lines of Schrodinger's purposes in bring up the cat, even if different conclusions are reached.

I like your idea to use relativity for fixing the unrealistic assumptions of the experiment. This reminds me of my reaction to Fuchs' and Peres' assertion:

If Erwin has performed no observation, then there is no reason he cannot reverse Cathy’s digestion and memories. Of course, for that he would need complete control of all the microscopic degrees of freedom of Cathy and her laboratory, but that is a practical problem, not a fundamental one.

This is non-sense, because the description of the experiment given previously was complete enough to rule out any possibility for Erwin to reverse the situation. ... If Erwin had access to a time machine enabling him to realistically reverse the situation, then it might turn out that Cathy and Erwin indeed lived multiple times through both situations (and experienced real macroscopic superpositions), as depicted in movies like “Back to the Future”.