Extremely cold atoms can selectively defy entropy

The laws of physics assert that an organised system will grow increasingly disordered over time until it dissolves into featureless mush – but a new experiment shows that some extremely cold atoms could avoid such entropy.

Any system beginning with low disorder, or low entropy, is bound to eventually become more of a mess. Picture flowers arranged in a bouquet: their entropy will gradually keep increasing until the brightly-coloured bundle…