The book discusses the journey of exploring complex equations that represent weather patterns. The mathematical representation of these highly complex systems appear to be nondeterministic at first glance, but patterns do appear which are highly dependent on initial conditions. This gives the insight that our complex systems which seem chaotic are actually deterministic in the end and we can predict the outcomes of any physical system if we understand how all of the variables interact.

hmmh, what I got out of it was a little different ... simple deterministic systems can have surprisingly complex emergent behavior that is quite hard to predict.

normally, if you disturb a system three things can happen, it can be stable, it can explode, or it can oscillate. corresponding to e^x where x is a complex number or a matrix.

but actually in the liminal area at the edge of cyclical behavior there is a mode that is neither cyclical nor stable and it happens quite a bit and is responsible for many interesting and important phenomena and systems.

there isn't much regularity, the only way to predict is a model of the evolution of the whole system which is highly sensitive to small disturbances or measurement errors.