Parsing Science - Bending the Laws of Physics

"Nothing in life is certain," writes MIT mechanical engineer Seth Lloyd, "except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics." But is this necessarily so? In episode 52, we're joined by Andreas Schilling with the University of Zurich, who discusses his development of an amazingly simple device that allows heat to flow from a cold object to a warm one without an external power supply; a process that initially appears to contradict this fundamental law of physics. His open-access article "Heat flowing from cold to hot without external intervention by using a 'thermal inductor'" was published with Xiaofu Zhang and Olaf Bossen on April 19, 2019 in the journal Science Advances.