{"id":181098,"date":"2024-01-22T10:26:16","date_gmt":"2024-01-22T16:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/the-invisible-dance-of-particles"},"modified":"2024-01-22T10:26:16","modified_gmt":"2024-01-22T16:26:16","slug":"the-invisible-dance-of-particles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/the-invisible-dance-of-particles","title":{"rendered":"The Invisible Dance Of Particles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-invisible-dance-of-particles2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 1,827, botanist Robert Brown studied pollen particles\u2019 motion as they were suspended in water. These little grains seemed to jitter around randomly. Brown performed as variety of tests on them and realized that all small particles, not just pollen, exhibited the same motion when suspended in water. Something other than the presence of life was causing these little particles to move around. Mathematicians took note and quickly developed a theory describing this process and named it Brownian Motion in his honor.<\/p>\n<p>This theory has expanded well beyond its original context and become a beautiful subfield of mathematics called Stochastic Processes. Nowhere was this influence illustrated better than in 1905 when Albert Einstein used the theory of Brownian Motion to verify the existence of atoms. The makeup of our universe\u2019s tiniest particles was highly debated at the time, and Einstein\u2019s work helped solidify atomic theory.<\/p>\n<p>Wow, that\u2019s quite the leap! In order to understand how we got from pollen grains to confirming atomic theory, we\u2019re going to have to learn some background about Brownian Motion. In this article, I\u2019ll spend some time talking about the basics. This includes some cool videos that demonstrate the patterns of Brownian Motion and the statistics going on behind the scenes. We\u2019ll then dive into Einstein\u2019s version which came as one of his extremely influential series of papers in 1905. There\u2019s a lot of ground to cover, so let\u2019s get started!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1,827, botanist Robert Brown studied pollen particles\u2019 motion as they were suspended in water. These little grains seemed to jitter around randomly. Brown performed as variety of tests on them and realized that all small particles, not just pollen, exhibited the same motion when suspended in water. Something other than the presence of life [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,2229,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}