>Now if only all scientific papers were written just so then I might be able to comprehend (if I'm lucky) a third of it! :o)

I know what you mean. I've been struggling myself to write technical and understandable papers. Usually it makes more sense to just write two papers, one technical and one figurative. I'd like to know what you think of this, its a little story the explains quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle that is hopefully easy to figure out:

We start with an angel named Steve.

Being that Steve is an angel we know that he is not made of the matter we observe. Also, he does not exist in the time or space we observe. This is cool because that means Steve does not abide to the laws of physics we know of and we are free to invent new laws of physics for him. Here:

1. An angel may still move by inertia
2. Angels cannot see other angels
3. There are baseballs flying around this angel-world which an angel can catch if they cross paths
4. When an angel catches a baseball his speed and direction changes based on the speed and direction of the incoming ball
5. The angel then throws the baseball, without a specific target he just chucks it randomly

Ok, so Steve is chilling, and all of a sudden he catches a baseball.

He adjusts his speed and direction, and then he throws the ball.

Let's now say this has continued for a while. Steve has been catching, adjusting, and throwing and the results of his adjustments have managed to group together a handful of angels in a collection. Sort of like how gnats seem to keep a swarm together, somehow the specific rules of how an angel reacts and adjusts by catching a baseball have managed to swarm together some angels. These angels still don't see each other or interact with each other through any mechanism except for the baseballs being tossed around.

During all of this the angels are pretty manageable. The direction the balls are coming from vary, naturally, as the positions of the angels in the group are always changing, but they are still somewhat predictable.

All of a sudden a baseball comes from somewhere totally unexpected. This confuses Steve. There must be something out there besides his known group in the local vicinity.

Through only ball speak Steve manages something pretty incredible. He and his buddies arrange themselves into a sophisticated configuration. This configuration enables them to coordinate the throws of their baseballs in some general direction. They are able to catch external baseballs from some general direction and through a sophisticated network of internal throws they are able gather and store information about these external catches. They are even able to compute based on this information.

What type of computations are performed? Say they throw a large number of baseballs in a general direction, and a number of baseballs comes back from that direction. The computer realizes there is another group of angels out there refracting back a fraction of the balls thrown at it. The computer can take the data of successive throws and catches to estimate the size and shape of the other group, triangulate its distances, and approximate the speed and direction of the group at large.

This is a good deal of information that arises from the network of angels. However, despite how much interesting information can be gathered this way, there are still limits to how specific the information can be. For example, if it takes multiple throws to determine the position, direction, and speed of a specific angel, after every throw the angel will have changed its position, direction, and speed. So information about a single specific state of an angel will always be incomplete in this way.

I propose that the universe works in the following manner:

1. There is a set of actors and events that we do not experience or observe.
2. The information produced by these actors and events is our reality, a subset of the universe which I call nature.

The information I speak of is not the angels and baseballs, but rather a set of information arising from the network of angels and baseballs. Everything that is real to us exists in this information; this information is what our environment and ourselves are composed of. The complexity observed in our reality, in this information called nature, is the result of yet another unseen complexity in the universe.

This interpretation of observed phenomena in the universe is fairly consistent with what is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics with some interesting differences. In the Copenhagen view reality is created by observation. In the view that I have just proposed the observations of the large configuration creates our reality as well.