All cats are now Schrodinger cats. Once you understand that, the whole cat business falls into place.

The original Schrodinger cats were the offspring of an infamous quantum mechanics experiment of the 1930s (or possibly they weren't the original ones. Possibly there were no original ones.)

Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need go. Then you add a little bottle-smashing mechanism which may—or may not–smash the bottle; it all depends on random nuclear thingummies being given off by some radioactive material. This is also in the box. It is a large box. Now, according to quantum theory, the cat in the box is both a wave and a particle… hang on, no. What it is, because of all these quantums, is in a state of not actually being either alive or dead,

That's the story that got into the textbooks, anyway.

If you can believe it. It's like the one about one twin staying here and the other going off to Sirius at the speed of light and coming back and finding his brother is now a grandfather running a huge vegetable wholesale operation in Bradford. How does anyone know? Has anyone met them? What was it like on Sirius, anyway?

Less well known is the work by a group of scientists who failed to realise that Schrodinger was talking about a “thought experiment”

They left out one important consideration, though. While the observer might not know what was going on, the cat in the box damn well would. We can assume that if the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then the inkling that, any minute now, some guy in a white coat is going to lift the lid and there's a fifty-fifty chance that you are dead already, does wonders for the brain. Spurred by this knowledge, and perhaps by all the quantums floating around the laboratory, the cat nipped around a corner in space-time and was found, slightly bewildered, in the janitor's cupboard.