thermodynamics

Black holes are already strange enough, regions of space where gravity is so extreme that not even light can escape. But physicists have long known there's another layer of weirdness, that black holes also behave like thermodynamic objects, with temperature, entropy, and phase transitions just like a gas or a liquid. Now, a new approach borrowed from pure mathematics is revealing hidden patterns …

Nature Geoscience, Published online: 11 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41561-026-02019-9 Magmatism induced by a mantle plume bearing a relatively high proportion of dense fusible mantle material may have formed the Ontong Java Plateau, the largest extant oceanic plateau, according to thermodynamic modelling.

Nature Communications, Published online: 10 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-74265-9 High-performance chip-scale microcombs are vital for precision measurement and coherent communications, yet traditional self-injection locking is limited by thermo-refractive noise that creates a trade-off between repetition rate and linewidth. Here, authors propose a cascaded structure to separate comb generati…

Nature, Published online: 09 June 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01817-w Theories about how ice crystals grow in cooling liquids are wildly inaccurate when compared with experimental data, but studies are starting to illuminate the earliest moments in freezing.

Chapter 40 of the Dao De Jing is one of the most condensed cosmological statements in the history of human thought: 'Reversal is the movement of the Dao; yielding is its application. All things under heaven are born from being; being is born from non-being.' Drawing on the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC) framework and integrating modern thermodynamics, complexity science, cybernetics, and quant…

It's been almost a decade since I last wrote about this topic , and a preprint on the arXiv this week is a good jumping off point for more discussion. Thermometers are devices that allow us to take some physical observable and infer temperature.  I wrote about the nature of temperature 17 years ago (!!!) in a way that did not completely satisfy me or most of my readers, so maybe I should take ano…

A student’s routine lab shake produced a liquid that kept rebuilding a strange ancient shape, forcing scientists to rethink a basic rule.

To help with the idea, imagine a box sits in lab in frame S. At some moment, it somehow spontaneously creates 10 J of energy from nothing, without any push, so its momentum doesn't change: ΔE = 10 J, Δp = 0. Observer S' moves past at v = 0.6c (so γ = 1.25). Does this energy-creation event look... Read more

Nature Physics, Published online: 04 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03301-8 A two-state regime in deeply undercooled water has long been predicted. Now the existence of two local structures that undergo interconvertible reactions is suggested by simulations, corroborating the two-state picture.

I have 2 question about matter and atoms. I’m trying to learn here, excuse my ignorance :/ 1. Is it possible for matter to be completely destroyed at the atomic level so that it no longer exists at all? For instance, if you exposed ashes to extremely high temperatures, such as those found in... Read more

Hello~ I've been reading about the Foundations of Statistical Mechanics recently and found the topic of foundations Entropy quite interesting (although I haven't actually gotten to the section on Entropy yet in the book I'm reading -- A. I. Khinchin Foundations of SM). I was wondering if this... Read more

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recreated part of the intense chaos inside a nuclear fireball to better understand how radioactive fallout forms. Their experiments revealed that the way vaporized materials cool can dramatically change the particles that eventually form, especially for volatile elements like cesium.

Researchers at IMDEA Materials Institute have developed a new hybrid methodology that combines quantum mechanics and thermodynamic calculations to predict the phase diagram of nickel-cobalt alloys.

Entropy is a measure of disorder, given by the amount of information necessary to precisely specify the state of a system. Entropy is important in information theory and statistical physics. We can give a precise mathematical definition of the entropy in probability theory. We will want a couple of preliminary definitions. Fix a probability space ; that is, is a set, and is a probability measure …

A hypothesis about the emergence of thermodynamics in many body quantum systems. Mark Srednicki, Chaos and Quantum Thermalization, Phys Rev E 50 (1994) 888 [arXiv:cond-mat/9403051v2] Mohsen Alishahiha, Mohammad Javad Vasli: Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis: A Short Review [arXiv:2501.07243] Stefan Eccles: Why ETH? On thermalization and locality [arXiv:2502.04784] See also: Wikipedia, Eigensta…

im having trouble writing the newton ecuations, i do not understand how the friction force is applied to the person. I wrote this: The coordinates that i choose are X in the direction of the movement, and Y perpendicular to X Forces applied to the person are the Normal force NA (vertical and... Read more

Prior work in the SNSFT PSY series formally characterized two failure modes for High-Resolution Internal Simulation (HRIS) architectures under external force overload (F_ext):Narrative Lock (P-dominant, healthy), Simulation Drift (N-dominant, Paper 3), and the GNG edge case (P-dominant near torsion limit). This paper establishes a fourth and distinct failure mode: Adversarial Shutdown — the struc…

This paper establishes the formal mathematical and structural characterization of the Narrative-Dominant (N-dominant) High-Resolution Internal Simulation (HRIS) cognitive architecture within the Substrate-Neutral Structural Foundation Theory (SNSFT) framework. Prior work in the SNSFT corpus modeled the Pattern-Dominant (P-dominant) HRIS profile—the processing profile evidenced historically by fig…