science

In 1865, Rudolf Clausius needed a name for his new quantity. He'd discovered something fundamental—a measure of how much thermal energy was unavailable for useful work. He chose "entropy," from the Greek entropia, meaning transformation. The name stuck. The concept conquered physics. Entropy became the

In the early 1900s, Walther Nernst was studying chemical reactions at low temperatures. He noticed something strange: as temperature dropped, the entropy change in reactions approached zero. No matter what chemicals he used, the same pattern emerged. Nernst proposed a new principle in 1906: as temperature approaches absolute zero, the

Here's a video: an egg falls off a counter, hits the floor, and splatters. Now play it backward: fragments leap up, yolk reconstitutes, shell reassembles, the intact egg rises to the counter. The backward video violates no laws of mechanics. Every particle follows Newton's equations. Energy

The Universe's Decision Function Here's something that should stop you in your tracks: the universe has an optimization criterion. It's not conscious. It doesn't deliberate. But every chemical reaction, every phase transition, every biological process happening in your body right now is

We've traveled through four laws: the Zeroth, First, Second, and Third. Each seems to say something different. Temperature transitivity. Energy conservation. Entropy increase. The unreachability of absolute zero. But here's the secret: they're all facets of one thing. The four laws aren't

In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell proposed a thought experiment that should have been resolved in a decade. It took 115 years. Imagine a box of gas divided by a wall with a tiny door. A demon—a tiny, intelligent being—watches molecules approach. When a fast molecule comes from the