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Brownian motion

Yesterday we were celebrating Nikita's win at the Norwegian physics olympiad, so I made some cakes for all of my students. Herman, always the inquisitive student, decided to shake up the box to see what would happen. Noticing the fairly random motion of the cakes he commented that this might be Brownian motion but I wasn't so certain. Brownian motion is the random motion of smoke particles, caused by being bombarded by air atoms. This motion is caused by Herman shaking the container. I thought I'd do a quick analysis of the video, using LoggerPro, to see how random the motion was.This image shows the path of one of the cakes. It looks quite random but when we look at the individual components plotted against time we get: Here we can see the 2 dimensional oscillations of Herman's hand. So it's not Brownian motion it is Simple Hermanic Motion.

Tags: brownian motion

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