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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Physicists at West Virginia University have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics. West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old ...

The second law of thermodynamics says, in simple terms, entropy always increases. This principle explains, for example, why you can't unscramble an egg. When you purchase through links on our site, we ...

Just over 200 years after French engineer and physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law of thermodynamics, an international team of researchers has unveiled an analogous law for the quantum ...

Picture Victorian London, but its skies are filled with airships. Steam-powered robots crowd the streets, mingling with people in top hats and petticoats. That type of retrofuturistic mash-up is the ...

Turing machines are widely believed to be universal, in the sense that any computation done by any system can also be done by a Turing machine. In a new article, researchers present their work ...

Quantum mechanics and classical physics don’t always get along, and can sometimes form apparent paradoxes where observed quantum behavior violates well-established physical laws. In quantum mechanics, ...

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 ...