Researchers at West Virginia University just released a paper detailing how the fundamental law can be applied more broadly than ever before—a finding that has the potential to rewrite the way we understand complex energetic systems.
The first law of thermodynamics is one of the bedrock laws of physics. Even if you’re not gung-ho about physics research, you might have heard the simplified version: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be converted into different forms.
Suppose you heat up a balloon,” said Paul Cassak, lead author on the paper, in a press release. “The first law of thermodynamics tells you how much the balloon expands and how much hotter the gas inside the balloon gets. The key is that the total amount of energy causing the balloon to expand and the gas to get hotter is the same as the amount of heat you put into the balloon.”
This law has been an incredibly helpful tool for physicists since its discovery in the 1850s. But there’s a catch—it has historically only worked when things are in or near a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
At its core, that means the temperature of a system is consistent throughout. There aren’t big hot and cold spots; it’s all basically the same temperature, which means it all has pretty much the same amount of energy.
Researchers have long been trying to find a way to apply the first law to systems that are not in equilibrium.
The breakthrough for this team of researchers came in the form of a lot of complicated math. Basically, the energy conversion in systems that are in thermodynamic equilibrium can be described almost entirely by their density and pressure.
What the team needed was a way to quantify all of the energy conversion that wasn’t described by density and pressure. And they found it.
The work could have applications in fields ranging from circuitry and quantum computing to space weather.
Ref: Popular Mechanics; PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS ( https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.085201 )
