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, A contains twice as many particles as B, at that instant the probability of a particle leaving A to enter B is twice as great as the probability that a particle will leave B to enter A. A physical process in which a substance tends to spread steadily from regions of high concentration to regions of lower concentration is called diffusion. Thus, diffusion is a macroscopic manifestation of Brownian motion on the microscopic level. It is thus 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. By classical Brownian motion is meant the random movement of microscopic particles suspended in a liquid or gas. Brown was investigating the fertilization process in Clarkia pulchella, a newly discovered species of flower, when he noticed a rapid oscillatory motion of the pollen grains suspended in water under the microscope. Other researchers had noticed this phenomenon earlier, but Brown was the first to actually study it. Initially, he believed that such activity was peculiar to the male sexual cells of plants, but then he was startled to observe that pollen of plants dead for over a century showed the same movement; he 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 or particles of smoke. 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 remained unchanged. More systematic investigation in 1889 determined that small particle size and low viscosity of the surrounding fluid resulted in faster motion. (Top) Random motion of a Brownian particle; (bottom) random discrepancy between the molecular Since higher temperature (see Figure) 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 matter developed in the third quarter of the 19th century by the physicists J.C. Maxwell, L. Boltzmann, and R.J.E. 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 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 M. 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 discovered that, according to atomistic 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 constantly to wobble back and forth. A smaller particle, a less-viscous fluid, and a higher temperature each would 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 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 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.