Brownian motion

Brownian motion, also called Brownian

movement,

any of various
physical phenomena in which some quantity is constantly undergoing small, random
fluctuations. It was named for the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, the first to study such
fluctuations (1827).
If a number of particles subject to Brownian motion are present in a given medium and there is
no preferred direction for the random oscillations, then over a period of time the particles will
tend to be spread evenly throughout the medium. Thus, if A and B are two adjacent regions and,
at time t, Acontains twice as many particles as B, at that instant the probability of a particles
leaving A to enter Bis twice as great as the probability that a particle will leave B to enter A. The
physical process in which a substance tends to spread steadily from regions of high concentration
to regions of lower concentration is called diffusion. Diffusion can therefore be considered a
macroscopic manifestation of Brownian motion on the microscopic level. Thus, it is possible to
study diffusion by simulating the motion of a Brownian particle and computing its average
behaviour. A few examples of the countless diffusion processes that are studied in terms of
Brownian motion include the diffusion of pollutants through the atmosphere, the diffusion of
holes (minute regions in which the electrical charge potential is positive) through
a semiconductor, and the diffusion of calcium through bone tissue in living organisms.

Early investigations
The term classical Brownian motion describes the random movement of microscopic particles
suspended in a liquid or gas. Brown was investigating the fertilization process in Clarkia
pulchella, then a newly discovered species of flowering plant, when he noticed a rapid
oscillatory motion of the microscopic particles within the pollen grains suspended in water
under the microscope. Other researchers had noticed this phenomenon earlier, but Brown was the
first to study it. Initially he believed that such motion was a vital activity peculiar to the male sex
cells of plants, but he then checked to see if the pollen of plants dead for over a century showed
the same movement. Brown called this a very unexpected fact of seeming vitality being retained
by these molecules so long after the death of the plant. Further study revealed that the same
motion could be observed not only with particles of other organic substances but even with chips
of glass or granite and particles of smoke. Finally, in inarguable support of the nonliving nature
of the phenomenon, he demonstrated it in fluid-filled vesicles in rock from the Great Sphinx.
Early explanations attributed the motion to thermal convection currents in the fluid. When
observation showed that nearby particles exhibited totally uncorrelated activity, however, this
simple explanation was abandoned. By the 1860s theoretical physicists had become interested in

Brownian motion and were searching for a consistent explanation of its various characteristics: a
given particle appeared equally likely to move in any direction; further motion seemed totally
unrelated to past motion; and the motion never stopped. An experiment (1865) in which a
suspension was sealed in glass for a year showed that the Brownian motion persisted. More
systematic investigation in 1889 determined that small particle size and low viscosity of the
surrounding fluid resulted in faster motion.

Einsteins theory of Brownian motion

Since higher temperatures also led to more-rapid Brownian motion, in 1877 it was suggested that
its cause lay in the thermal molecular motion in the liquid environment. The idea that
molecules of a liquid or gas are constantly in motion, colliding with each other and bouncing
back and forth, is a prominent part of the kinetic theory of gases developed in the third quarter of
the 19th century by the physicists James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Rudolf
Clausius in explanation of heat phenomena. According to the theory, the temperature of a
substance is proportional to the averagekinetic energy with which the molecules of the substance
are moving or vibrating. It was natural to guess that somehow this motion might be imparted to
larger particles that could be observed under the microscope; if true, this would be the first
directly observable effect that would corroborate thekinetic theory. This line of reasoning led the
German physicist Albert Einstein in 1905 to produce his quantitative theory of Brownian motion.
Similar studies were carried out on Brownian motion, independently and almost at the same
time, by the Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski, who used methods somewhat different from
Einsteins.

Einstein wrote later that his

major aim was to find facts that would guarantee as much as possible the existence of atoms of
definite size. In the midst of this work, he discovered that according to atomic theory there would
have to be an observable movement of suspended microscopic particles. Einstein did not realize
that observations concerning the Brownian motion were already long familiar. Reasoning on the
basis of statistical mechanics, he showed that for such a microscopic particle the random
difference between the pressure of molecular bombardment on two opposite sides would cause it
to constantly wobble back and forth. A smaller particle, a less viscous fluid, and a higher
temperature would each increase the amount of motion one could expect to observe. Over a
period of time, the particle would tend to drift from its starting point, and, on the basis of kinetic
theory, it is possible to compute the probability (P) of a particles moving a certain distance (x) in
any given direction (the total distance it moves will be greater than x) during a certain time
interval (t) in a medium whose coefficient of diffusion (D) is known, D being equal to one-half

the average of the square of the displacement in the x-direction. This formula for probability
density allows P to be plotted against x. The graph is the familiar bell-shaped Gaussian
normal curve that typically arises when the random variable is the sum of many independent,
statistically identical random variables, in this case the many little pushes that add up to the total
motion. The equation for this relationship is

The introduction of the ultramicroscope in 1903 aided quantitative studies by making visible
small colloidal particles whose greater activity could be measured more easily. Several important
measurements of this kind were made from 1905 to 1911. During this period the French
physicist Jean-Baptiste Perrin was successful in verifying Einsteins analysis, and for this work
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1926. His work established the physical theory of
Brownian motion and ended the skepticism about the existence of atoms and molecules as actual
physical entities.