(Just a preface that I tried /askscience to see but it was a bit complicated for me)
In the question I mean: do particles (eg gas) move truly randomly or is there a method behind the “random”?
Thank you!
In: Physics
This is a weird one to answer because its not really a yes or no answer. From what I understand it has to do with whether or not we are looking at them. This is an old video that explains an experiment that threw the theories behind it on its [head](https://youtu.be/Q1YqgPAtzho). Forgive the crappy animation but the idea is the still cool.
I think it depends on the conditions and how you define random. Given enough information, you could calculate the trajectory of each molecule probably, but that’s not really practical. As such, without information to the opposite, they are moving ‘randomly’.
Condition wise, air is a homogeneous mixture of gases, so yes it’s a random mixture in that the concentrations of each is going to equal in all samples you take of that air. Now, if I have some dry ice on a desk, the CO2 molecules from that ice are going to be on average traveling away from the ice due to the concentration difference. Air close to ice has more CO2. No longer homogeneous air in that rooom untill it evens out. Diffusion is on of those things that impacts everything, but it’s still a ‘random’ process leading to a general trend in the chaos. 🙂
Simple answer: nobody knows, but there are a number of arcane
theories (consisting of dense mathematics) that try to answer this.
At small enough scales yes, particles ‘move’ randomly. But this isn’t so much just how they move and more about existence itself. A lot of people will misconstrue the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle to be about measurement or some human influence but it is much more than that. The uncertainty in particle location and momentum, and therefore how it ‘moves’, is a fundamental property. It exists because there isn’t exact information about the location or momentum.
That isn’t to say we cant say on average how things move, we do that all the time. But at the smallest scales movement isn’t a defined property.
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