As Homer Simpson once famously phrased, “ in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics ,” but a new and completely unexpected discovery by a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst runs ...

It is one of the most important laws of nature that we know: The famous second law of thermodynamics says that the world gets more and more disordered when random chance is at play. Or, to put it more ...

Almost exactly 200 years ago, French physicist Sadi Carnot determined the maximum efficiency of heat engines. The Carnot ...

More than 200 years ago, Count Rumford showed that heat isn’t a mysterious substance but something you can generate endlessly ...

A routine lab experiment by a college student has turned into one of the strangest physics stories of the year, hinting that a simple mixture of oil, water, and metal particles might behave in ways ...

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 ...

When French engineer Sadi Carnot calculated the maximum efficiency of a heat engine in 1824, he had no idea what heat was. In those days, physicists thought heat was a fluid called caloric. But Carnot ...

Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including ...

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 ...

One of the enormous conceptual ideas that came along with Einstein's theory of relativity was the surprise that time itself, long considered fundamental and universal, is actually relative. Different ...

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy in the universe must always increase. It's an immutable law of physics, and it's the reason you can't get free energy or perpetual motion machines.

Even if it turns out that time loops never take shape, studying them provides key insights into the deepest rules of reality.