Brownian motion on the discontinuous structure of matter". The direction of the force of atomic bombardment is constantly changing, and at different times the particle is hit more on one side than another, leading to the seemingly random nature of the motion. The many-body interactions that yield the Brownian pattern cannot be solved by a model accounting for every involved molecule. In consequence only probabilistic models applied to molecular populations can be employed to describe it. Two such models of the statistical mechanics, due to Einstein and Smoluchowski are presented below. Another, pure probabilistic class of models is the class of the
Rotational Brownian motion imposed electric field. Rotational Brownian motion was first discussed by Peter Debye, who applied Einstein's theory of translational Brownian motion to the rotation of molecules having permanent electric dipoles. Debye ignored inertial effects and assumed that the molecules were spherical, with an intrinsic, fixed dipole moment. He derived expressions for the dielectric relaxation time and for the permittivity. These formulae have been successfully applied to many materials. However, Debye's expression for the permittivity predicts that the absorption tends toward a constant value when the frequency of the applied electric field becomes very large—the "Debye plateau". This is not observed; instead,