Thermodynamics and statistical physics provide complementary frameworks for describing many-particle systems. Thermodynamics identifies a small set of macroscopic variables—energy, entropy, volume, ...

Physicists at West Virginia University have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics. West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old ...

For more than half a century, materials scientists have struggled with how to simulate the complexity of polymer materials.

Have you ever heard of a Perpetual Motion Machine? More to the point, have you ever heard of why Perpetual Motion Machines are impossible? One of the reasons is because of the first law of ...

"In quantum physics, the entire system is described by a single large many-particle quantum state," says Prof. Joachim Burgdörfer (TU Wien). "How a random distribution and thus a temperature should ...

Image of argon plasma glowing a bluish color in an experiment at the WVU Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics. (Credit: WVU Photo/Brian Persinger) The four laws of thermodynamics are an established ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about physics, science, academia, and pop culture. We're nearing the end of a months-long home improvement project that ...

Noise is the enemy of many computing paradigms. Conventional computers are power hungry because they must operate at energy ...

Recent studies have developed fundamental limitations on nanoscale thermodynamics, in terms of a set of independent free energy relations. Here we show that free energy relations cannot properly ...