Do we live in a simulation? This is one of those questions which has kept at least part of humanity awake at night, and which has led to a number of successful books and movies being made on the ...

Research conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is taking a closer look at entropy—the measure of internal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work—in ...

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 nuclear engineer reacts to an experiment that appears to challenge the second law of thermodynamics. The discussion explores the physics behind energy flow entropy and why certain results may seem ...

A device based on a 155-year-old thought experiment has been realised at the largest scale yet, and it may help us understand how entropy, or disorder, is produced. It could also someday be used to ...

Heat flows from hot to cold objects. When a hot and a cold body are in thermal contact, they exchange heat energy until they reach thermal equilibrium, with the hot body cooling down and the cold body ...