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 ...

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy within an isolated system always increases. This iron-clad law has remained true for a very long time. However, researchers from the U.S.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are the foundation of heat transfer and energy work. When any engineer is designing or implementing a system, the consideration of heat loss or energy produced is influenced ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

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 ...

Ben Carson claimed that prevailing theories of how the universe began and how planets and stars formed violate the second law of thermodynamics. His comments represent a misunderstanding of scientific ...

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 ...