The second law of thermodynamics gets trotted out all the time, especially in conversations about evolutionary biology. Less familiar are principles of maximum entropy production, which deal specifically with systems that are not in equilibrium (everything the same temperature). Most of the situations we experience involve differences in temperature, but there’s still a lot to learn about how physics works when temperatures differ (at least partly because the math is more complicated). Which brings us to this study of what carbon nanotubes do to maximize entropy when they aren’t at equilibrium.