h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am not a physicist, yet this problem concerns me. Because of what happened, or did not happen here in Cardiff thirty years ago.

We had two cats and four remaining kittens. Two were black and wgite. The other two were tabby, and could not be told apart from one another.

They were avid feeders at breakfast time and would leap up onto me to get food off the plate in my arms, so each morning I would make sure I put all four into the garden by opening the kitchen door and putting them outside whilst I dished up their food.

So, I put four kittens into our back garden. A few minutes later I put out there food for them and watched them all scrambling for position to feed. They were all there, quite clearly observeable on a well-lit sunny morning, and my friend told me later he was certain that all four were indeed there.

I shut the back door, sat down and had a coffee. I opened the back door to retrieve the empty dish, and could see only three kittens, the two black and white kittens and one tabby.

Unusual, so I noticed it and looked around, shrugged and going back inside finished my coffee and was joined by one of the people I shared the house with.

I told him that a kitten could not be seen playing with the others as usual. He looked and said he could not see the kitten either, and we both went outside to check. No kitten.

He left, but bothered I went out again and thoroughly searched our 40 foot strip of garden.

On the heap of ashes from a bonfire at the end of the garden I found the cold swollen carcase of a dead tabby kitten.

The timespan was less than an hour from when I last saw my four kittens very much alive at breakfast.

It looked like my kitten. I measured the swollen body along the spine and compared its length with its twin. They were almost the same, but the dead body was very dead and had swollen.

It had certainly been dead several days.

Schrodinger was not the kitten's name.

Having listened to Melvyn Bragg's program also on this subject and reviewing the previous reader's practical observation, I would like to ask the following question:

What would happen if instead of using a cat in the box you used a stopwatch also triggered by the falling hammer. That way after one hour the stopwatch would be at either 0 minutes or somewhere between 0 and 60 thus proving the cat's either been alive all along or had keeled over a little earlier.