Researchers taking the first-ever direct measurement of atom temperature in extremely hot materials inadvertently disproved a decades-old theory and upended our understanding of superheating. It's ...

Statistical physics relates the properties of macroscale systems to the distributions of their microscale agents. Its central tool has been the maximization of entropy, an equilibrium variational ...

Gold usually melts at 1,300 kelvins—a temperature hotter than fresh lava from a volcano. But scientists recently shot a nanometers-thick sample of gold with a laser and heated it to an astonishing ...