Alive, Dead, or Bloody Furious?

The LOLcat phenomenon has reached the world of physics, with this Schrödinger cat picture, which is pretty good. I'm also amused by Serge's poem from Making Light:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue.

Is Schrödinger's Cat dead?

That remains up to you.

I may need to get out more.

More like this

if spontaneous emission is the mechanism to release the cyanide and kill the cat, then the cat is alive or dead, and the vacuum knows which. For us, the state of the cat is a mixed state density matrix that has only diagonal elements.