Thermodynamics

Decades after a Tanzanian teenager initiated study of the “Mpemba effect,” the effort to confirm or refute it is leading physicists toward new theories about how substances relax to equilibrium.

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.

Thanks to the power of fluctuation relations, physicists are taking the second law of thermodynamics to settings once thought impossible.

A mathematical model shows how a thermodynamic mechanism could have made protocells split in two.

Investigations of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations — as well as insights into the nature of time itself.

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

Unusual proteins that can quickly fold into different shapes provide cells with a novel regulatory mechanism.

Push or crush a new class of materials, and they’ll undergo record-breaking temperature changes.

A new look at a ubiquitous phenomenon has uncovered unexpected fractal behavior that could give us clues about the early universe and the arrow of time.