Essentially, the Laws of Thermodynamics, as normally stated, don't really work at the QM level and Oppenheim is working on restating them to be more applicable.

Essentially, the Laws of Thermodynamics, as normally stated, don't really work at the QM level and Oppenheim is working on restating them to be more applicable. For example, changing the second law from "the entropy of a closed system never decreases" to "the free energy of a closed system never increases". It's a subtle change, but macroscopically all energies can be treated the same while at the QM level they have to be accounted for more carefully. It occurs to me as I write this that entropy is harder to explain physically than energy, and that while we have math to manage entropy calculations, it isn't really anything "real", while energy is always conveyed by real things (photons, electrons, etc.). So the second law has always been stated in a sort of negative (some thing "not a real thing" never decreases) while Oppenheim's work will reformulate in a positive way ("some real thing, quite a complex set of things, actually, never increases"). Intriguing. Simple changes of perspective sometimes have tremendous impacts on physics.