Topical Guide 599
Mark Dorset
Physical Phenomena: Brownian Motion
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 14:
IN THE HALL, I threw myself into the usual chaos of kids hurrying for their lockers before catching their buses for home, bumping against one another, rebounding, bumping into someone else, bouncing with a Brownian shuffle.
Brownian motion is the random motion of particles suspended in a medium (a liquid or a gas).
This motion pattern typically consists of random fluctuations in a particle’s position inside a fluid sub-domain, followed by a relocation to another sub-domain. Each relocation is followed by more fluctuations within the new closed volume. […]
This motion is named after the botanist Robert Brown, who first described the phenomenon in 1827, while looking through a microscope at pollen of the plant Clarkia pulchella immersed in water.
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