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
Brownian motion square root of the total population. Suppose that a Brownian particle of mass "M" is surrounded by lighter particles of mass "m" which are traveling at a speed "u". Then, reasons Smoluchowski, in any collision between a surrounding and Brownian particles, the velocity transmitted to the latter will be "mu"/"M". This ratio is of the order of 10 cm/s. But we also have to take into consideration that in a gas there will be more than 10 collisions in a second, and even greater in a liquid where we expect that there will be 10 collision in one second. Some