Statistical physics

Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof.

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 than a reflection of our growing ignorance. Embracing that truth is leading to a rethink of everything from rational decision-making to the limits of machines.

Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the field today.

The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.

In a world seemingly filled with chaos, physicists have discovered new forms of synchronization and are learning how to predict and control them.

Throughout nature, throngs of relatively simple elements can self-organize into behaviors that seem unexpectedly complex. Scientists are beginning to understand why and how these phenomena emerge without a central organizing entity.

When a crystallographer treated prime numbers as a system of particles, the resulting diffraction pattern created a new view of existing conjectures in number theory.

By reimagining the kinks and folds of origami as atoms in a lattice, researchers are uncovering strange behavior hiding in simple structures.

The new experiments suggest that simple models can explain the behavior of thousands of interacting organisms.