Physicist Rhett Allain wants to retire the messy-bedroom explanation of entropy. Disorder, he writes in Wired, "doesn't mean messiness or chaos" - it counts the ways a system's parts can be rearranged ...

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of ...

The second law of thermodynamics is one of those puzzling laws of nature that simply emerges from the fundamental rules. It says that entropy, a measure of disorder in the Universe, must always ...

I recently led a webinar on the laws of thermodynamics, which got me thinking: A business is very much a closed system, such as a universe. Therefore, if entropy is always increasing in a closed ...

Can the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? This intriguing hypothetical scenario, commonly called "the butterfly effect," has come to embody the popular conception of a ...

THERE is, I fear, a difficulty in drafting Prof. Bryan's definition so as to be clear as well as accurate. This arises when the definition is first given with reference to the entropy of the working ...

How it works When laser light passes through a cavity filled with atoms, part of it can do useful work. In this example the work is charging a quantum battery (top). The rest of the light turns into ...

FROM time to time controversies have appeared in various journals regarding that most difficult of all physical conceptions—entropy. I have purposely avoided passing any opinions as to the merits of ...