Brownian motion Brownian motion Brownian motion or pedesis (from "leaping") is the random motion of particles suspended in a fluid (a liquid or a gas) resulting from their collision with the fast-moving molecules in the fluid. This pattern of motion typically alternates random fluctuations in a particle's position inside a fluid sub-domain with a relocation to another sub-domain. Each relocation is followed by more fluctuations within the new closed volume. This pattern describes a fluid at thermal equilibrium, defined by a given temperature. Within such fluid there exists no preferential direction of flow as in transport phenomena. More specifically the fluid's overall
Perpetual motion costs energy (requiring Maxwell's demon to perform more thermodynamic work to gauge the speed of the molecules than the amount of energy gained by the difference of temperature caused) or the unidirectionality is an illusion and occasional big violations make up for the frequent small non-violations (the Brownian ratchet will be subject to internal Brownian forces and therefore will sometimes turn the wrong way). Buoyancy is another frequently misunderstood phenomenon. Some proposed perpetual-motion machines miss the fact that to push a volume of air down in a fluid takes the same work as to raise a corresponding volume of fluid