You're talking about the Uncertainty Principle, which is indeed a property of all waves and not unique to Quantum Physics (I like to use the analogy of taking a

You're talking about the Uncertainty Principle, which is indeed a property of all waves and not unique to Quantum Physics (I like to use the analogy of taking a single slice of a 44.1khz PWM data stream of an audio signal, in which you'd have 100% certainty of amplitude and 100% uncertainty of frequency. The more slices you take the more certain you are of frequency, less of amplitude.) Popular science and even QM itself has deeply confused itself on this issue over the past 100 years, yet it is as based in pure logic as the value of π is; nothing to do with the nature of the universe we happen to live in. But they seem to be talking about the so-called Observer Effect, an even more deeply confused issue in QM. I'm not a physicist but from what I've read it can be understood as a quantum system becoming entangled with another system, the detector/observer, which causes the original system to lose coherence. But nothing magical is happening due to consciousness or whatever, it's just 2 or more systems interacting and interfering with each other. The trick is that "observation" of a quantum system is said to collapse the wave function into well defined values instead of probabilities. I think this is explained well by Quantum decoherence[1], that the isolated system acquires phases from its surrounding environment and thus loses it's original coherence and superposition, however the total system of observed and observer is still coherent (and I'm not totally clear on why the new system takes up well defined values for certain properties, but it seems to be some dynamical time evolved process especially when a small system interacts with a much bigger one, if you can follow the linked article). And yes, I've heard these confusions combined into the notion that the universe only generates information when observed by some consciousness as some kind of space optimization, so maybe that is what the article is getting at. Again, not a physicist, so I could be just as confused as everyone else, but I prefer to try to understand things these ways than trying to make sense of the constant refrain of dead and alive cats, the darkside of the moon not existing until we sent a probe to see it, and "you might be able to be in two places at once, just like a quantum particle!" we get from pop-sci and some grant seeking scientists. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence