A December 10–12 working group met to bring together researchers from two fields — neuromorphic computing and stochastic ...

For two centuries, students have learned that heat flows and engines work according to rigid limits that no machine can beat.

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Laws of Thermodynamics explain ...