[CuriouslyC]

This isn't a matter of having an incomplete understanding, thanks for the offhanded aspersion though. The fundamental problem is that the concept of manifolds in state space isn't really something that has a non-tortured real world analogy, which is a prerequisite for a five year old to understand. It's probably possible to express more simply with a video demonstrating the covariance structure of a data set visually, then showing how that results from a small set of vectors, but I've read enough textbooks to be confident that a simple, concise explanation eludes words.