Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen
"Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen" (English: "On the movement of small particles suspended in a stationary liquid demanded by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat") is a journal article by Albert Einstein published in Annalen der Physik in May 1905. It is an important publication on Brownian motion in fluids, one of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers.
Before this paper, atoms were recognized as a useful concept, but physicists and chemists hotly debated whether atoms were real entities. Einstein's statistical discussion of atomic behavior gave experimentalists a way to count atoms with an ordinary microscope. Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the leaders of the anti-atom school, later told Arnold Sommerfeld that he had been converted to a belief in atoms by Einstein's complete explanation of Brownian motion.[1]
The paper also provided the best way up to that time of estimating Avogadro's Number—the corrected value from Einstein's paper was accurate to one significant figure.
References
- ↑ Clark, Robert. "Uber die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme gefordete Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen". The Literary Encyclopedia. Ed. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott and Janet Todd.
External links
- Einstein, Albert (May 1905). "Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen" (PDF). Annalen der Physik (in German). 322 (8): 549–560. Bibcode:1905AnP...322..549E. doi:10.1002/andp.19053220806. Retrieved 2008-04-10.
- Einstein, Albert; Fürth, R.; Cowper, A. D. (translator) (1956) [originally published in 1926]. "On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid Demanded by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat" (PDF). Investigations on the theory of the Brownian motion. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-60304-0.