Random motion and Brownian rotation

The course is centred on the Brownian motion - the random movement of molecules arising from thermal fluctuations of the surrounding medium - and starts with the classical theory of A. Einstein, M.v. Smoluchowski and P. Langevin. The first part of this article is quite elementary, and several of the questions raised in it have been instructively treated in a much more sophisticated way in recent reviews by Pomeau and Resibois and by Fox. This simple material may nevertheless be helpful to some readers whose main interest lies in approaching the work on Brownian rotation reviewed in the latter part of the present article. The simplest, and most brutally idealised, problem in our field of interest is that of the random walk in one dimension of space. Its solution leads on, through the diffusivity-mobility relation of Einstein, to Langevin's treatment of the Brownian motion. The application of these ideas to the movement of a molecule in a medium of similar molecules is clearly unrealistic, and much energy has been devoted to finding a suitable generalisation. We shall discuss in particular ideas due to Green, Zwanzig and Mori. (orig./WL)