Brownian motion: Difference between revisions

{{a|design|}}You will hear it said that the random motion of particles in Brownian motion — the proverbial “nice hot cup of tea” tends down to stillness only through the awesome force of entropy. That stable occupation of the cup is the state of maximum entropy towards which a random collection of molecules automatically tends. This is no more than the power of statistics over order; the number of recognisably “ordered” configurations of those atoms is so swamped by the colossal number of disordered configurations that the odds of an ordered configuration just never show up. It is logically possible for all the molecules in your cup of tea to spontaneously move to the right side of the cup at once, that is, just ''vanishingly unlikely''. It is a “twenty-five sigma” event: you could wait millions of times the life of the universe, and it never happened once. ''But it could happen''.