>IIRC, what Heisenberg was saying was that determinate systems have no meaning until observed. For instance the idea of an electron orbit is meaningless unless and until we observe it. It's when we try to bring that thinking into the macro world (the Schrödinger's cat, for example) that is becomes unwieldy. If you talk to a person with no scientific interest about electrons and the uncertainty principal, you'll generally get a bit of a head-shake, but acceptance. If you talk to that same person about the cat, they'll simply think you're nuts.

There's my wife's shopping law, as it applies to lettuce.

When buying lettuce, she picks one head at first glance, then puts it down, looks up two more, and finally buys the first one. Because it's the best one, as her intuition has already told her in the first place. But it couldn't become the best one without the other two.

Or, back home, where we had an actual street with shops, buying anything involved shopping around in at least four places... and finally going back to the first one.

So obviously, Schrödinger's cat is alive and not alive and well and not well, thank you, it's just a matter of hearing her purr and not purr in various other situations.