(Credit: Shutterstock) Some things may just be unknowable. How does the mind really work? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? What’s really going on with the stock market? While we may never truly learn all the answers, we’ve at least got a little more to go on with that last question, thanks to a paper out this week in Physical Review Letters that finds a surprising “real life” model for financial markets. And, happily, it’s one that scientists have used and understood for over a century: Brownian motion.
In 1827, botanist Robert Brown noticed that tiny pollen grains in water appear to move around, randomly jittering and jiggling. While the ultimate cause eluded him, the effect, Brownian motion, still bears his name. It would take until the early 20th Century, when no less a luminary than Albert Einstein helped figure out that the reason for the jiggling was actually ...
