What is osmosis? Explanation and understanding of a physical phenomenon

Abstract

Although osmosis is a familiar phenomenon, and of pivotal importance in natural systems, it is seldom explained how it might work on the molecular level (if treated at all in physics text books). The standard treatment of osmosis in thermodynamics employs the concept of the chemical potential and does not give any clues how the process "really" works. On the other hand one may also encounter conflicting qualitative and molecular explanations of osmosis. We use the case of osmosis in the present paper to elucidate different ways to "explain" and "understand" physical phenomena. The role of qualitative understanding of physical phenomena is emphasized. However, as the case of osmosis demonstrates, there may be a big gap between the abstract macroscopic theory and molecular conceptions of the mechanism.