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 ...

There are "costs of life" that mechanical physics cannot calculate. A clear example is the energy required to keep specific ...

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 ...

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 ...

A great number of scientific papers and publications come out of the Aspen Center for Physics, but none quite like Assa Auerbach’s latest. The Israeli physicist’s new graphic novel, “Max the Demon vs.

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 ...

For more than a century, thermodynamics has described how heat flows and engines run, while quantum mechanics has ruled the ...