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A friend once told me that the Schroedinger's Cat story was formulated specifically to discredit the whole waveform theory... anyone know if this friend was bullshitting me?
I'm not sure if it was his intention, but Schroedinger's Cat in the box has been a major impetus for theories purporting the non-existence of superpositions (non-collapsed wavefunctions) at the macroscopic level, a view currently held by most scientists. The reasoning is that at the microscopic level you can have particles (or systems of particles) described by a wavefunction. However, when you start going macroscopic, you now have a collection of particles that each has its own wavefunction, and they all tend to cancel each other out. So, whereas in the microscopic world, you can define a wavefunction for the system made up of Particle Al and Particle Beth, on the macroscopic level you can't because Particle Pete comes over with his "niece" Particle Lisa, Particle Tod comes over and brings his cat, Particle Spot, and 50 million other particles are in the pool, waiting for their turn in front of the water jet.
That's the cool thing about the Bose-Einstein condensate. It takes all the particles, lines them up against the wall, faces them North, and has them sing "Forever in Blue Jeans". That is, the Bose-Einstein condensate is a macroscopic moosh made up of microscopic parts that all have the same wave function, so the moosh itself can be considered to be one big particle with that wavefunction.
Not having superpositions at the macroscopic level doesn't refute quantum mechanics in any way. Instead, it shows what quantum mechanics looks like at one end of its spectrum -- that is, it shows quantum mechanics in the absence of superpositions.
I didn't know any of this stuff (except for the thrill of riding the water jet) till a couple of days ago when I started reading a kickass book called "Beyond Star Trek" by Lawrence M. Krauss. He also wrote "The Physics of Star Trek", which is a great book as well. Both take advanced scientific ideas and present them to the reader in an easy-to-understand but non-dumbed-down way. I really can't recommend any books higher.
