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is now known as the Brownian web was first conceived by Arratia in his Ph.D. thesis and a subsequent incomplete and unpublished manuscript.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 motion the particle. The displacement of a particle undergoing Brownian motion is obtained by solving the diffusion equation under appropriate boundary conditions and finding the rms of the solution. This shows that the displacement varies as the square root of the time (not linearly), which explains why previous experimental results concerning the velocity of Brownian particles gave nonsensical results. A linear time dependence was incorrectly assumed. At very short time scales, however, the motion of a particle is dominated by its inertia and its displacement will be linearly dependent on time: Δ"x" = "v"Δ"t". So the instantaneous velocity of the Brownian