When French engineer Sadi Carnot calculated the maximum efficiency of a heat engine in 1824, he had no idea what heat was. In those days, physicists thought heat was a fluid called caloric. But Carnot ...

The first law of thermodynamics is undergoing a huge renovation. A team lead by researchers at West Virginia University released a paper detailing how the fundamental law can be applied more broadly ...

Image of argon plasma glowing a bluish color in an experiment at the WVU Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics. (Credit: WVU Photo/Brian Persinger) The four laws of thermodynamics are an established ...

The laws of thermodynamics are pretty straightforward: Normally, heat from a hot object will flow to a cold one until they reach the same temperature, bringing the system to a state of equilibrium.

The young field of quantum thermodynamics, which tries to reconcile quantum theory with the 200-year-old science of heat and entropy, is booming. It’s also causing some heated disputes. Many ...

Researchers have made a breakthrough in applying the first law of thermodynamics to complex systems. The law is a bedrock of physics, but has long failed to describe systems that are out of ...