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 motion moment of probability of displacement formula_2, is interpreted as mass diffusivity "D": Then the density of Brownian particles "ρ" at point "x" at time "t" satisfies the diffusion equation: Assuming that "N" particles start from the origin at the initial time "t"=0, the diffusion equation has the solution This expression (which is a normal distribution with the mean formula_12 and variance formula_13 usually called Brownian motion formula_14) allowed Einstein to calculate the moments directly. The first moment is seen to vanish, meaning that the Brownian particle is equally likely to move to the left as it is to move to