Brownian ratchet

Rarity: Common

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At a glance

Class

Invention

Domain

Science and technology

Knowledge cost

5

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What Wikipedia says

In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, the Brownian ratchet or Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet is an apparent perpetual motion machine of the second kind (converting thermal energy into mechanical work), first analysed in 1912 as a thought experiment by Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Brownian ratchet”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: Htkym, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.