Re: The Last Word
That's not quite correct. Properly, he put the cat at risk of death when the cat went into the box.
Once the cat's in there, and before the box is reopened, it is improper to think of the cat as either simply alive or simply dead; it's a mixture of both states, with the relative proportions of the two states changing with time. The act of opening the box forces the state of the cat to have been resolved out of the in-the-box state and into one of the alive/dead conditions at the moment of the box opening.