Two physicists at the University of Stuttgart have proven that the Carnot principle, a central law of thermodynamics, does not apply to objects on the atomic scale whose physical properties are linked ...

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 ...

A growing body of theoretical and experimental work in physics is converging on a striking possibility: time, the dimension humans experience as a constant forward flow, may not be a fundamental ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, nature is filled with examples of order emerging from chaos. A new theoretical framework resolves the apparent paradox Science has given ...

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 ...

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, ...

West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics. Paul Cassak, professor and associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma ...

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 ...