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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Discover the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics like never before! In this video, we break down entropy, energy flow, and how this fundamental law governs the universe in simple, easy-to-understand terms.

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: ...

Chase P. Broedersz is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Ludwig ...