1

I.

EINSTEINS THEORY OF BROWNIAN MOTION

Brownian motion, first observed by the botanist *** Brown in 18***, consists in an erratic motion of micromeric
particles in suspension in a liquid and can be seen with a microscope. Possible explanations in terms of convective
motion of the solvent failed to give account of the observation. The theory of Einstein in 1905 esablishes that the
motion is a macroscopic manifestation of 1) the granular (atomic) nature of matter, 2) the molecular chaos. At
the time of Einstein, the atomic hypothesis originated in chemistry was still much debated, despite the success of
statistical mechanics in explaining thermodynamics in mechanicistic terms. Molecular chaos was a concept introduced
by Bolzmann postulating maximal disorder and essentially independence in the motion of molecules in diluted gases,
to derive an equation -the Bolzmann equation- describing the relaxation to equilibrium of these gases.
In order to explain Brownian motion, Einstein first observation is that according to the atomic hypothesis a
suspension should differ from a solution solely for the size of the particles in solution. Accordingly, a suspention
separated by a semi-permeable membrane from a fluid should exhert an osmotic pressure on the fluid.
In the diluted limit in which it is possible to neglect the interaction between the particles of the solute it is easy to
derive, from statistical mechanics, the law of perfect gases. If V is the volume occupied by the macroscopic particles,
and there are N of the probability at equilibrium of findinng the N particles in the phase space element d3N xd3 N p
is proportional to
!
N
X
2
p(x, p) exp
pi /(2KB T )
(1)
i=1

the probability of the position of each particle is uniform in space, while the momena follow the Maxwell disribution;
T is the temperature, KB the Boltzmann constant. According to thermodynamics, the osmotic pressure can be
computed as p = F /V . According to statistical physics, the free-energy is related to the partition function Z
by F = KB T log Z with
Z =

(2)