Brownian web Brownian web In probability theory, the Brownian web is an uncountable collection of one-dimensional coalescing Brownian motions, starting from every point in space and time. It arises as the diffusive space-time scaling limit of a collection of coalescing random walks, with one walk starting from each point of the integer lattice Z at each time. What is now known as the Brownian web was first conceived by Arratia in his Ph.D. thesis and a subsequent incomplete and unpublished manuscript. Arratia studied the voter model, an interacting particle system that models the evolution of a population's political opinions. The individuals of
Brownian ratchet for example lifting a weight ("m") against gravity. The energy necessary to do this work apparently would come from the heat bath, without any heat gradient. Were such a machine to work successfully, its operation would violate the second law of thermodynamics, one form of which states: "It is impossible for any device that operates on a cycle to receive heat from a single reservoir and produce a net amount of work." Although at first sight the Brownian ratchet seems to extract useful work from Brownian motion, Feynman demonstrated that if the entire device is at the same temperature, the