If I could magically correct one misconception about quantum physics, it would be that Schrodinger's cat isn't intended as an explanation of quantum mechanics, but was him mocking it. Oh, and that he was a prolific child abuser.
One might well ask why someone who developed as many important theoretical results in quantum mechanics would mock it at the same time.
I don't claim to be a historian of such things, but my understanding is that a prevailing school of thought was that quantum mechanics was an effective theory for something that better agreed with classical intuition; that is, that interpreting quantum mechanics as a theory in its own right was ridiculous.
It wasn't until things like Bell's Theorem that the idea of rescuing classical intuition from quantum mechanics was more or less put to rest. Until that, though, it wasn't uncommon to treat quantum mechanics as a kind of stop-gap theory.
From that point of view, Schrodinger's cat isn't an attempt to explain quantum mechanics, but an outdated and incorrect argument that quantum mechanics has no explanation at all. Using it today is terrible pedagogy, to say the least.
One last thought, namely on why this matters: telling people over and over again that quantum mechanics is ridiculous and confusing has a huge effect on who is and isn't confident enough to pursue learning about quantum stuff. That disparity only reinforces existing and endemic power dynamics in extremely toxic ways.
That is not to say that I think things would be better if more minoritized people sought out a career in quantum-related fields; that's an inherently capitalistic and correspondingly problematic way of viewing things.
Rather, exclusionary cultural memes like Schrodinger's cat contribute to the power dynamics that make quantum fields unsafe for minoritized people who do decide to study quantum and quantum-adjacent subjects.
@xgranade
The cat also supports the notion that because there can be no explanatory theory of quantum physics we should all just “shut up and compute”. Of course this has left open the discourse about how quantum states “collapse” to observables to every quack theory about how everything is connected (as Mike Ford pointed out, that’s why there are so many short circuits).
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