Thermodynamics

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

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.

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.

Researchers explore a loophole that extracts useful energy from a fluid’s seemingly random motion. The secret? Sugar and asymmetry.

A recent experiment shows how quantum mechanics can make heat flow from a cold body to a hot one, an apparent (though not real) violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.

As physicists extend the 19th-century laws of thermodynamics to the quantum realm, they’re rewriting the relationships among energy, entropy and information.

According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass.

Nature’s large-scale patterns emerge from incomplete surveys that borrow ideas from information theory.