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BROWNIAN MOTION:
In 1827 the biologist Robert Brown noticed that if you looked at pollen grains in water
through a microscope, the pollen jiggles about. He called this jiggling 'Brownian motion',
but Brown couldn't work out what was causing it. The first of the three papers that
Einstein published in 1905 finally came up with an explanation.
Everything around us is made up of atoms and molecules: the chair you're sitting on, the
food you eat, the air you're breathing. The idea of atoms has been around since the time
of the ancient Greeks, and a century before Einstein, the great chemist John Dalton had
suggested that all chemicals were made of tiny invisible molecules, which in turn were
made of even tinier atoms. The problem was that there was no proof of their existence,
until Einstein looked into the problem of Brownian motion.
Einstein realised that the jiggling of the pollen grains seen in Brownian motion was due to
molecules of water hitting the tiny pollen grains, like players kicking the ball in a game of
football. The pollen grains were visible but the water molecules weren't, so it looked like
the grains were bouncing around on their own.
Einstein also showed that it was possible to work out how many molecules were hitting a
single pollen grain and how fast the water molecules were moving - all by looking at the
pollen grains.
Importantly, Einstein's paper also made predictions about the properties of atoms that
could be tested. The French physicist Jean Perrin used Einstein's predictions to work out
the size of atoms and remove any remaining doubts about the existence of atoms.
http://hyperphysics.phy-
astr.gsu.edu/hbase/kinetic/diffus.html
Diffusion Processes
Basic idea:
In its simplest form, diffusion is the transport of a material or chemical
by molecular motion. If molecules of a chemical are present in an
apparently motionless fluid, they will exhibit microscopic erratic
motions due to being randomly struck by other molecules in the fluid.
Individual particles or molecules will follow paths sometimes known as
"random walks."
Ref:
http://www.ilpi.com/genchem/demo/tension/Surface
Tension
[View demo] [How it works]
Introduction
The Demo
Water molecules are what are called dipoles: they have an electric 'pole' at each
end of the molecule with opposite charges because the electrons in the molecule
tend to congregate near the oxygen atom and away from the hydrogen atoms.
Thus the negative part of one water molecule will attract the positive parts of
other, nearby molecules. This is why water falls from the sky as raindrops, and
not individual molecules, or why water tends to bead up on the hood of your
freshly waxed car, or why you can cause water to bulge out over the rim of a
glass if you fill it carefully; the molecules are all pulling together.
Water molecules are not only attracted to each other, but to any molecule with
positive or negative charges. When a molecule attracts to a different substance,
this is termed adhesion. Think about what happens when you dip one end of a
piece of paper towel into a glass of water. The water will climb up the fibers of the
paper, getting it wet above the level of the water in the glass. We know gravity is
pulling down on the water, so why do they move up? Because the water
molecules' positive and negative charges are attracted to the positive and
negative charges in the cellulose molecules in the paper.
Note that both the examples above have both cohesion and adhesion occuring
but one is stronger than the other. If the water molecules are more strongly
attracted to each other than to the surrounding material, they bead up and try to
get as close to each other as possible. If there is a stronger attraction to some
other material, they spread out and try to get close to the other material.