Interest in the concept of entropic forces has risen considerably since Verlinde proposed in 2011 to interpret the force in Newton's second law and gravity as entropic forces. Brownian motion-the motion of a small particle (pollen) driven by random impulses from the surrounding molecules-may be the first example of a stochastic process in which such forces are expected to emerge. In this article, it is shown that at least two types of entropic force can be identified in three-dimensional Brownian motion. This analysis yields simple derivations of known results of Brownian motion, Hooke's law, and-applying an external (non-radial) force-Curie's law and the Langevin-Debye equation. (C) 2014 American Association of Physics Teachers.
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