Brownian motion (named after the botanist Robert Brown) or pedesis (from Greek: πήδησις Pɛɖeːsɪs "leaping") is the presumably random drifting of particles suspended in a fluid (a liquid or a gas) or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, which is often called a particle theory.

In 1827 the biologist Robert Brown noticed that if you looked at pollen grains in water through a microscope, the pollen jiggles about. He called this jiggling 'Brownian motion', but Brown couldn't work out what was causing it. The direction of the resultant force is constantly changing. At different times the pollen grain is hit more on one side than another, hence the random nature of the motion.

The mathematical model of Brownian motion has several real-world applications. An often quoted example is stock market fluctuations, although Benoit Mandelbrot rejected its applicability to stock price movements in part because these are discontinuous.

Brownian motion is among the simplest of the continuous-time stochastic (or probabilistic) processes, and it is a limit of both simpler and more complicated stochastic processes (see random walk and Donsker's theorem). This universality is closely related to the universality of the normal distribution. In both cases, it is often mathematical convenience rather than the accuracy of the models that motivates their use. This is because Brownian motion, whose time derivative is everywhere infinite, is an idealised approximation to actual random physical processes, which always have a finite time scale.

Albert Einstein ( /ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.

Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.