The exact details of both situations – stock transactions and water atom movements – are very different, but the probabilistic outcome is the same. This pattern can also apply to the movement of stock markets, with many individual transactions building up to affect the price of stock.
The idea was that each atom of water knocks a pollen grain, which doesn’t have much affect on its own, but that thousands of such knocks add up to move the pollen in a way that can be predicted by probability. Physicists thought that matter was made up of small particles known as atoms, but couldn’t prove it until they applied this idea to ‘Brownian motion’ – the way particles like pollen move in a liquid like water. This principle – universality – helped prove the existence of atoms.
FLAMING SCHRODINGER FULL
In the special lecture, which you can view in full in the video above, Professor Hairer took the audience on a journey through probability, and the way seemingly dissimilar events can be described in a similar way by probability. He won the Fields Medal in 2014 and was knighted in 2016. Professor Martin Hairer, from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial, is a world leader in probability theory and analysis. The past, present and future of probability theory was presented by Professor Sir Martin Hairer at this year’s annual Schrödinger lecture.
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