Thermodynamics

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.

A black hole formula worked out in the 1970s remains the most concrete clue physicists have about the threads of the space-time fabric.

This special issue of Quanta Magazine explores the ultimate scientific quest: the search for the fundamental nature of reality.

The Industrial Revolution brought us the laws of thermodynamics, and new ideas about work, energy and efficiency. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern about what these concepts might mean in the age of quantum mechanics.

While devising a new quantum algorithm, four researchers accidentally established a hard limit on entanglement.

Time is all around us: in the language we use, in the memories we revisit and in our predictions of the future. But what exactly is it? The physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek joins Steve Strogatz to discuss the fundamental hallmarks of time.

A new phase of matter called a “time crystal” plays with our expectations of thermodynamics. The physicist Vedika Khemani talks with Steven Strogatz about its surprising quantum behavior.

The quantum energy teleportation protocol was proposed in 2008 and largely ignored. Now two independent experiments have shown that it works.

Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes ink to spread through water.