Thermodynamics

The Industrial Revolution brought us the laws of thermodynamics, and new ideas about work, energy and efficiency. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern about what these concepts might mean in the age of quantum mechanics.

While devising a new quantum algorithm, four researchers accidentally established a hard limit on entanglement.

Time is all around us: in the language we use, in the memories we revisit and in our predictions of the future. But what exactly is it? The physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek joins Steve Strogatz to discuss the fundamental hallmarks of time.

A new phase of matter called a “time crystal” plays with our expectations of thermodynamics. The physicist Vedika Khemani talks with Steven Strogatz about its surprising quantum behavior.

The quantum energy teleportation protocol was proposed in 2008 and largely ignored. Now two independent experiments have shown that it works.

Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes ink to spread through water.

Two physicists have calculated that the universe has a higher entropy — and is therefore more likely — than alternative possible universes.

Decades after a Tanzanian teenager initiated study of the “Mpemba effect,” the effort to confirm or refute it is leading physicists toward new theories about how substances relax to equilibrium.

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.