West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics. Paul Cassak, professor and associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma ...

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 ...

Preserving quantum information is key to developing useful quantum computing systems. But interacting quantum systems are chaotic and follow laws of thermodynamics, eventually leading to information ...

A series of quantum physics experiments and theoretical papers now suggest that heat can flow spontaneously from a cold object to a hot one, provided the right quantum conditions are in place. This ...

A growing body of theoretical and experimental work in physics is converging on a striking possibility: time, the dimension humans experience as a constant forward flow, may not be a fundamental ...

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 ...

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 ...

Physicists in the UK and Russia have revived concepts first put forth in the 1940s to develop a new theory of the heat capacity of liquids. Created by Dima Bolmatov and Kostya Trachenko of Queen Mary, ...