In 2002, a seminal paper on Brownian motors published in the American Institute of Physics magazine Physics Today, "Brownian motors", by Dean Astumian and Peter Hänggi. There, they proposed the then novel concept of Brownian motors and posited that "thermal motion combined with input energy gives rise to a channeling of chance that can be used to exercise control over microscopic systems". Astumian and Hänggi provide in their paper a copy of Wallace Stevens ' 1919 poem, The Place of the Solitaries to elegantly illustrate, from an abstract perspective, the ceaseless nature of noise.