Quantum thermodynamics has emerged as an innovative field that integrates the principles of quantum mechanics with classical thermodynamic concepts to describe systems beyond equilibrium. Central to ...

Physicists have upended a foundational law of materials science by heating gold to over 19,000°C — more than 14 times its melting point — while it remained perfectly solid. The study, published in ...

One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems. The demonstration, by chemical physicists in ...

As physicists extend the 19th-century laws of thermodynamics to the quantum realm, they’re rewriting the relationships among energy, entropy and information. In his 1824 book, Reflections on the ...

Can a demon defeat the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? The second law of thermodynamics – the law that entropy must, on average, increase – has been interpreted as the inevitability of the decay of ...

An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties. Popular hypotheses credit a primordial ...