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AS ALL of us are no doubt aware, this year has been declared "world year of physics" to celebrate the three remarkable breakthroughs made by Albert Einstein in 1905. However, it is not so well known that Einstein's work on Brownian motion – the random motion of tiny particles first observed and investigated by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827 – has been cited more times in the scientific literature than his more famous papers on special relativity and the quantum nature of light. In a series of publications that included his doctoral thesis, Einstein derived an equation for Brownian motion from microscopic principles – a feat that ultimately enabled Jean Perrin and others to prove the existence of atoms (see Physics World January pp19–22).
Klafter et al. (2005) studied this question.