As Homer Simpson once famously phrased, “ in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics ,” but a new and completely unexpected discovery by a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst runs ...

More than 200 years ago, Count Rumford showed that heat isn’t a mysterious substance but something you can generate endlessly ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Researchers have made a breakthrough in applying the first law of thermodynamics to complex systems. The law is a bedrock of physics, but has long ...

Even if it turns out that time loops never take shape, studying them provides key insights into the deepest rules of reality.

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 ...

A routine lab experiment by a college student has turned into one of the strangest physics stories of the year, hinting that ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Learn all about thermodynamics, the science that explores the relationship between heat and energy in other forms. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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 ...