Redirect has no effect ? or How to make a reload?

I have a form for creating an object in a pop up window. When the new
object has been submitted, I need to update the parent window, the one
that created the pop up window.

I do it by a redirect to the action that created the parent window.
This is done in the action create (that is used to create the new
object)

… if @research_notation.save
redirect_to :action => :show, :controller
=> :person_cards, :id=>Person.current.id

However, nothing happens, according to a debug print of the new
variable, although the log writes out the redirect as
Redirected to http://localhost:3000/person_cards/214
When I manually use the browsers relaod function everything works as
expected

Maybe I have misunderstand the direct command. My understanding was
that a redirect to :action ‘show’ is the same as calling the action or
method ‘show’

Or what dows redirect mean?
Is thre any other ways to solve my problem of trying to reload the
parent window

Any help would be very much appreciated

modify the location/href attribute of the parent using javascript