Brownian ratchet ratchet will not rotate continuously in one direction but will move randomly back and forth, and therefore will not produce any useful work. The reason is that since the pawl is at the same temperature as the paddle, it will also undergo Brownian motion, "bouncing" up and down. It therefore will intermittently fail by allowing a ratchet tooth to slip backward under the pawl while it is up. Another issue is that when the pawl rests on the sloping face of the tooth, the spring which returns the pawl exerts a sideways force on the tooth which tends to rotate
Brownian surface Brownian surface A Brownian surface is a fractal surface generated via a fractal elevation function. For instance, in the three-dimensional case, where two variables "X" and "Y" are given as coordinates, the elevation function between any two points ("x", "y") and ("x", "y") can be set to have a mean or expected value that increases as the vector distance between ("x", "y") and ("x", "y"). There are, however, many ways of defining the elevation function. For instance, the fractional Brownian motion variable may be used, or various rotation functions may be used to achieve more natural looking surfaces. As with