Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Researchers have made a breakthrough in applying the first law of thermodynamics to complex systems. The law is a bedrock of physics, but has long ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Statistical physics and thermodynamics provide a framework for relating the behaviour of microscopic particles to the macroscopic properties of a system. Thermodynamics casts these macroscopic, or ...

It would take a foolhardy physicist to dare attempt to break the laws of thermodynamics. But it turns out that there may be ways to bend them. At a lab at the University of Oxford, UK, quantum ...