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 ...

How it works When laser light passes through a cavity filled with atoms, part of it can do useful work. In this example the work is charging a quantum battery (top). The rest of the light turns into ...

Thanks to the power of fluctuation relations, physicists are taking the second law of thermodynamics to settings once thought impossible. Since the steam engine began modernizing the world, the second ...

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If there’s one law of physics that seems easy to grasp, it’s the second law of thermodynamics: Heat flows spontaneously from hotter ...