Due in part to his untimely death from cholera in 1832, Carnot’s work fell on deaf ears. A decade later, however, his theme was taken up again by Kelvin, then a young professor at Glasgow, and by the German scientist Rudolf Clausius. Over the next decade Kelvin and Clausius, pointed in the right direction by the experiments of James Joule in Manchester, completed Carnot’s tentative definitions of heat and temperature, and so formulated the basis of thermodynamics. The Nobel Prize for Physics Explore the work of recent Nobel laureates, find out what happens behind the scenes, and discover some who were overlooked for the prize At its very core, biothermodynamics rests upon the principles of classical thermodynamics. The first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. Enthalpy is derived from this principle and can be defined as the heat subtracted or added by a chemical process at a constant pressure. The second law determines that for a process to occur spontaneously, it needs to increase the entropy of the universe. Rounding up, the third law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero. In 2002 Carlos Bustamante at the University of California and co-workers stretched a single RNA molecule by using a laser trap to tug at a tiny plastic bead attached to one end. As the molecule was stretched, its energy increased, so that by letting the bead go the researchers could study the effect of random energy fluctuations as the molecule contracted again. In the case of a long and flexible RNA molecule, these fluctuations are driven by the constant Brownian bombardment of billions of surrounding water molecules, which causes it to wiggle. Bustamante’s team stretched the RNA molecule many times with the same energy, and found that its “relaxation path” was different every time. At the macroscopic scale, it would be as if a stretched spring, after it has been let go, spontaneously stretched itself a little bit more for a short period by absorbing and emitting random bursts of energy.

The industry of life – Physics World The industry of life – Physics World

Imagining a microscopic single-molecule process, Jarzynski calculated not the simple average of the system’s energy as it was pulled away from equilibrium, but the average of the exponential of that energy. Remarkably, he showed that this exponential average had the same value as the equilibrium energy change applicable to an equivalent slow and smooth version of the process. To Jarzynski, this was a surprise because it meant that information about macroscopic equilibrium was somehow buried inside individual, randomly fluctuating microscopic systems far from equilibrium.

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Jenkinson, Denis (June 1990). "Delusion". Motor Sport magazine archive. p.6 . Retrieved 17 July 2017.

Life Engine The Life Engine

Nanotechnology in action The challenges and opportunities of turning advances in nanotechnology into commercial productsFeatures Take a deeper look at the emerging trends and key issues within the global scientific community Advances in microscopy and laser trapping are allowing researchers to drive a second thermodynamical revolution couched in the language of biotechnology and nanotechnology rather than coal and steam William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who died 100years ago on 17December1907, was one of the pioneers of the science of energy: thermodynamics Supercool physics Experiments that probe the exotic behaviour of matter at ultralow temperatures depend on the latest cryogenics technology To load custom creations (found in /dist/assets), you must have a simple web server that serves all files in the dist directory. I do this with python: