Start simply. Imagine a coin lying on a horizontal plate. Vibrate the plate horizontally—with a short forward motion followed by a weak backward pull—and the coin drifts across the surface.

Now imagine a coin exposed to random horizontal vibrations. It too drifts, but in a completely different way.

From such modest beginnings, a simple controlled vibration to a random one, P.G. de Gennes will explain the emergence of a complex macroscopic feature: Brownian motion. He uses this elegant approach—finding common features in widely different physical systems—to understand how randomness can translate to order and to describe even the most “untidy” systems in general terms.

de Gennes, a world-renowned expert on liquid crystals, polymer physics, colloid and interface science, has been called “the Isaac Newton of our time.”

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