Does Quantum Mechanics Flout the Laws of Thermodynamics?

Quantum mechanics is the most successful description of nature known to humans, yet it has many bizarre implications for our understanding of the world. There are phenomena of superposition (objects being in two places at the same time), entanglement (correlations that exceed any classical correlations) and nonlocality (apparent ability for information to travel instantaneously across vast distances). As my cover story in the June issue of Scientific American discusses, these oddities are not just limited to subatomic realms, but challenge our conception of the everyday world, too. Now, in a paper published in Nature, together with my colleagues from Switzerland and Singapore, I have discovered yet another counterintuitive consequence of quantum physics.