When it comes to big question, there aren’t much bigger than this: what is the entropy of the Universe, the amount of disorder or “mixedupness” in the cosmos? Max Tegmark at the Massachusetts ...

Science popularization has its legends and heroes, just like any other field, though I’ve heard no plans as yet to open a Hall of Fame. Should that day come, one of the first inductees would ...

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world ...

Irreversible changes in physical systems — such as the breaking of a glass on hitting the floor or the formation of a crystal from its melt — only occur because of an increase in entropy (Box 1). Yet ...

The second law of thermodynamics is one of those puzzling laws of nature that simply emerges from the fundamental rules. It says that entropy, a measure of disorder in the Universe, must always ...