superscript

The passage around this formula

Einstein’s equation described one physical system: particles buffeted by a fluid held at a fixed temperature, governed by a single constant D . Within a decade, physicists working on an unrelated problem — how the energy of a rotating electric dipole settles under both random radiative kicks and a systematic damping force in a radiation field — found they needed the same mathematical object with one addition: a drift term standing alongside the diffusion term. Adriaan Fokker wrote down that generalization in 1914, and Max Planck rederived and extended it in 1917; the combined equation has carried both names since [ 3 ] . In one dimension it reads $\frac{\partial p(x,t)}{\partial t} = -\frac{\partial}{\partial x}\big[\mu(x,t)\,p(x,t)\big] + \frac{\partial^{2}}{\partial x^{2}}\big[D(x,t)\,p(x,t)\big]$. where the first…

Read this part in the article →