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okay, here's one layperson's translation:
You put a cat in a box. Then you have poison that can be triggered by a quantum event-perhaps a half-silvered mirror that you send an electron through. The electron has a fifty-fifty chance of actually going through the mirror. If it goes through, it triggers the poison. So there's a 50% chance that the cat is dead, and a 50% chance that the cat is alive. But according to quantum theory, until the observation is made, the electron both did and didn't go through the mirror, and the cat is therefore both dead and alive. Schrödinger said that according to quantum theory, until a conscious observer opens the box and looks, the cat is both dead and alive.
Schrödinger's point was that the conscious observer interpretation was absurd.
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