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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A routine lab experiment by a college student has turned into one of the strangest physics stories of the year, hinting that a simple mixture of oil, water, and metal particles might behave in ways ...

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 ...

Thermodynamics is the science of energy transfer and its effects on the properties of matter. It primarily deals with concepts such as temperature, heat, work, internal energy, and the laws governing ...

The amount of energy in the universe is constant and can neither be destroyed nor created, that's what the first law of thermodynamics tells us. When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

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 ...

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