Recently, a team of researchers made headlines for a stunning announcement: a theoretical breakthrough that expanded our understanding of the first law of thermodynamics. But to understand that result ...

Nernst's theorem—a general experimental observation presented in 1905 that entropy exchanges tend to zero when the temperature tends to zero—has been directly linked to the second principle of ...

In real life, laws are broken all the time. Besides your everyday criminals, there are scammers and fraudsters, politicians and mobsters, corporations and nations that regard laws as suggestions ...

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” but anyone who’s ever taken an introductory Physics class knows that there’s something more ...

Thanks to the power of fluctuation relations, physicists are taking the second law of thermodynamics to settings once thought impossible. Since the steam engine began modernizing the world, the second ...

Can quantum systems become more disordered, as thermodynamics would predict? Yes, they can - if a proper definition of "entropy" is used. It is one of the most important laws of nature that we know: ...