Paul Davies' newest book, The Demon in the Machine, takes aim at one of the great outstanding scientific enigmas—what is life, how and why does it emerge and what distinguishes the living from the non-living? The book, ...
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 warming up. This is ...
Maxwell's demon is a machine proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. The hypothetical machine would use thermal fluctuations to obtain energy, apparently violating the second principle of thermodynamics. Now, researchers ...
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated ...
Researchers at the University of Florence and Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi, in Italy, have recently proved that the invasiveness of quantum measurements might not always be detrimental. In a study published in Physical ...
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, ETH Zurich, and Argonne National Laboratory, U.S, have described an extended quantum Maxwell's demon, a device locally violating the second law of thermodynamics ...
Reduced entropy in a three-dimensional lattice of super-cooled, laser-trapped atoms could help speed progress toward creating quantum computers. A team of researchers at Penn State can rearrange a randomly distributed array ...
Thermodynamics is one of the most human of scientific enterprises, according to Kater Murch, associate professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
In the original Maxwell's demon thought experiment, a demon makes continuous measurements on a system of hot and cold reservoirs, building up a thermal gradient that can later be used to perform work. As the demon's measurements ...
Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics. Instead, the engine's efficiency ...
