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Twenty-five years of nanoscale thermodynamics

A paper published in 1997 brought the thermodynamics of the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century — expanding the physics of transformations involved in the operation of steam engines to the realm of molecular motors.
  1. Chase P. Broedersz

    1. Chase P. Broedersz is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, 80333 Munich, Germany.

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  2. Pierre Ronceray

    1. Pierre Ronceray is in the Interdisciplinary Center of Nanoscience of Marseille, the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the Turing Centre for Living Systems, Aix-Marseille Université, 13009 Marseille, France.

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The history of thermodynamics begins in 1824, when the French engineer Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot observed that a steam engine’s efficiency has a natural limit. The German physicist Rudolf Clausius made sense of this with a mathematical inequality that became known as the second law of thermodynamics: a quantity that he called entropy keeps increasing until a system reaches equilibrium. This law has since become a fixed feature of university physics curricula, and remained unimproved for more than a century — until 25 years ago, when Christopher Jarzynski1 proposed an improved relationship that has intriguing consequences for microscopic systems, such as the tiny engines that drive living organisms.

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Nature 604, 46-47 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00869-y

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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