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
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,