A challenge in materials design is that in both natural and humanmade materials, volume sometimes decreases, or increases, with increasing temperature. While there are mechanical explanations for this ...

It is one of the most important laws of nature that we know: The famous second law of thermodynamics says that the world gets more and more disordered when random chance is at play. Or, to put it more ...

For more than a century, gravity has been the stubborn outlier in physics, perfectly described on cosmic scales yet refusing to mesh with the quantum rules that govern everything else. A growing camp ...

Entropy. The word itself should cause insomnia. It means that matter and energy will degrade—ultimately leading to chaos in the universe—if things are left alone. So why is a new theory suggesting ...

Entropy estimation and information theory form the bedrock of our understanding of uncertainty and complexity in both natural and engineered systems. At its core, entropy quantifies the ...

It’s notoriously difficult to take the temperature of really hot things. Whether it’s the roiling plasma in our Sun, the extreme conditions at the core of planets or the crushing forces at play inside ...