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Brownian motion
physics

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Also known as: Brownian movement

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Mar 8, 2024 • Article History

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Brownian motion, any of various physical

phenomena in which some quantity is
constantly undergoing small, random
fluctuations. It was named for the Scottish
zoom_in
botanist Robert Brown, the first to study
such fluctuations (1827).

If a number of particles subject to Brownian

Brownian particle
motion are present in a given medium and
there is no preferred direction for the See all media

random oscillations, then over a period of

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time the particles will tend to be spread
Also called: Brownian movement
evenly throughout the medium. Thus, if A
Key People: Albert Einstein • Robert
and B are two adjacent regions and, at time t,
Brown • Wendelin Werner • Jean
A contains twice as many particles as B, at Perrin

that instant the probability of a particle’s Related Topics: motion • kinetic

theory
leaving A to enter B is twice as great as the
On the Web: Massachusetts Institute
probability that a particle will leave B to
of Technology - Brownian Motion
enter A. The physical process in which a (Mar. 08, 2024)
substance tends to spread steadily from
regions of high concentration to regions of See all related content →

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.

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Physics and Natural Law

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.

Einstein’s 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 average kinetic 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 the kinetic 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 Einstein’s.

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 play_arrow
discovered that according to atomic theory
there would have to be an observable
movement of suspended microscopic
Learn about Albert Einstein's
particles. Einstein did not realize that theory of Brownian motion and
observations concerning the Brownian how he derived the size of atoms
based on how much the Brownian
motion were already long familiar. particles move
Reasoning on the basis of statistical Description of Albert Einstein's theory of
Brownian motion and how he derived t…
...(more)
mechanics, he showed that for such a
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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 particle’s
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

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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 Einstein’s 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.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Erik Gregersen.

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Science & Tech

freefall
physics

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Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jan 30, 2024 • Article History

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Freefall, in mechanics, state of a body that

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moves freely in any manner in the presence
Related Topics: gravity •
of gravity. The planets, for example, are in weightlessness • motion • equivalence
free fall in the gravitational field of the Sun. principle • gravitation

An astronaut orbiting Earth in a spacecraft

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experiences a condition of weightlessness
because both the spacecraft and the
astronaut are in free fall. Both experience the
same gravitational pull from Earth, but the spacecraft does not ultimately fall to
the ground, because its forward velocity keeps it in orbit around Earth.
Gravitational forces are never uniform, and therefore only the centre of mass is in
free fall. All other points of a body are subject to tidal forces because they move in
a slightly different gravitational field. Earth is in free fall, but the pull of the Moon
is not the same at Earth’s surface as at its centre; the rise and fall of ocean tides
occur because the oceans are not in perfect free fall.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Erik Gregersen.

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Science & Tech

Wendelin Werner
French mathematician

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Written by Jeremy John Gray
Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Article History

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Wendelin Werner (born September 23,
Category: Science & Tech
1968, Cologne, West Germany [now in
Born: September 23, 1968, Cologne,
Germany]) German-born French West Germany [now in Germany] (age
mathematician who was awarded a Fields 55)

Medal in 2006 “for his contributions to the Awards And Honors: Fields Medal
(2006)
development of stochastic Loewner
Subjects Of Study: Brownian motion
evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional
Brownian motion, and conformal theory.”
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Werner received a doctorate from the

University of Paris VI (1993). In 1997 he
became a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, and he
held that post until 2013, when he joined the faculty at ETH Zürich.
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Numbers and Mathematics

Brownian motion is the best-understood mathematical model of diffusion and is

applicable in a wide variety of cases, such as the seepage of water or pollutants
through rock. It is often invoked in the study of phase transitions, such as the
freezing or boiling of water, in which the system undergoes what are called critical
phenomena and becomes random at any scale. In 1982 the American physicist
Kenneth G. Wilson received a Nobel Prize for his investigations into a seemingly
universal property of physical systems near critical points, expressed as a power
law and determined by the qualitative nature of the system and not its microscopic
properties. In the 1990s, Wilson’s work was extended to the domain of conformal
field theory, which relates to the string theory of fundamental particles. Rigorous
theorems and geometrical insight, however, were lacking until the work of Werner
and his collaborators gave the first picture of systems at and near their critical
points.

Werner also verified a 1982 conjecture by the Polish mathematician Benoit

Mandelbrot that the boundary of a random walk in the plane (a model for the
diffusion of a molecule in a gas) has a fractal dimension of 4/ (between a one-
3
dimensional line and a two-dimensional plane). Werner also showed that there is a
self-similarity property for these walks that derives from a property, only
conjectural until his work, that various aspects of Brownian motion are
conformally invariant. His other awards included a European Mathematical
Society Prize (2000) and a Fermat Prize (2001).

Jeremy John Gray