The production of entropy, which means increasing the degree of disorder in a system, is an inexorable tendency in the macroscopic world owing to the second law of thermodynamics. This makes the ...

A science experiment explores how entropy, often linked to disorder, can sometimes lead to structured patterns and organized behavior under the right conditions.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6, 2023 – Though a cornerstone of thermodynamics, entropy remains one of the most vexing concepts to teach budding physicists in the classroom. As a result, many people oversimplify ...

Physicists have upended a foundational law of materials science by heating gold to over 19,000°C — more than 14 times its melting point — while it remained perfectly solid. The study, published in ...

Physicists at the University of Oxford in the UK have conducted an experiment that suggests the more accurately clocks tick, the more disorder, or entropy, occurs in the universe. The second law of ...

Physicists have employed a version of Maxwell's demon to reduce entropy in a three-dimensional lattice of super-cooled, laser-trapped atoms -- a process that could help speed progress toward creating ...

An international team of scientists was able to create a nifty quantum experiment that at first might appear to have broken thermodynamics: They were able to create a spontaneous heat flow from a cold ...

Physicists at Penn State University have devised a quantum equivalent of a famous 19th-century thought experiment, capable of creating order out of an array of randomly distributed atoms. Such highly ...