Sadi Carnot was a child of the Industrial Revolution. Steam power was widely used in manufacturing and mining by his birth in 1796, and the first steamboat and first steam railroad locomotive were ...

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 ...

In the strange, often unintuitive world of quantum physics, one mystery has stood out for decades: Can quantum entanglement be manipulated in a reversible way, like energy in a perfect heat engine?

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 ...

An international collaboration sheds new light on the relationship between quantum theory and thermodynamics. The research group demonstrated that while the laws of quantum theory alone do not ...

Albert Einstein explained the following in his Autobiographical Notes of 1949: “A theory is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different things it relates, and the ...

Scientists have used computer models to expand on a famous thought experiment in physics. Maxwell’s Demon is an idea that seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics, and scientists have argued ...

A fundamental rule that determines the fate of the universe The second law of thermodynamics means hot things always cool unless you do something to stop them. It expresses a fundamental and simple ...