Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: 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 ...

For more than a century, thermodynamics has described how heat flows and engines run, while quantum mechanics has ruled the strange behavior of atoms and photons. Physicists have long suspected that ...

Recent studies have developed fundamental limitations on nanoscale thermodynamics, in terms of a set of independent free energy relations. Here we show that free energy relations cannot properly ...