Schrodinger's cat is just like the old school intuition that is subject to errors. It is also why physics may have a better public image than math, due to the higher availability of intuitive ideas in describing physical phenomena. We wouldn't need a simultaneously alive and dead cat if people were more educated about the idea of a random variable. Heck, five seconds on wikipedia leads to "a random variable conceptually does not have a single, fixed value (even if unknown); rather, it can take on a set of possible different values, each with an associated probability."