Work and Heat Are Two Different Forms of Energy Transferred Between Two Different Bodies

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quantum theory could get around carno's bound, but so far it has not been broken. Work and heat are the two types of energy that are being transferred between two different bodies. You can directly harness work to push a rock up a hill or charge a battery. Whereas is random energy, so it's uncoordinated. It's not doing something useful. Although if you wanted to, then you could use it in conjunction with an engine to do something worse useful, to turn it into work.

Randomness and probability are central to modern physics. In statistical mechanics this is because we don’t know everything about the distribution of atoms and molecules in a fluid, so we consider a probability distribution over what they might be; in quantum mechanics it’s because the theory only lets us predict measurement outcomes probabilistically. Physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern explains how we’ve been lagging behind at bringing these two theories together, and how recent progress is changing the landscape of how we think about the microworld.

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Nicole Yunger Halpern received her Ph.D. in physics from Caltech. She is currently a NIST physicist and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Physics and IPST at the University of Maryland. Her Ph.D. thesis won the international Ilya Prigogine Prize for a thermodynamics dissertation. As a postdoc she received the International Quantum Technology Emerging Researcher Award. Her new book is Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow.

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