That the 2nd law can be temporarily violated on nanometer scale is not news: that was already experimentally demonstrated years ago. The interesting thing in this publication is that they experimentally verified a certain theoretical description of that phenomenon.
Well the second law of thermodynamics really isn't a law of physics but of probability, since it basically states that it is very improbable for a macroscopic system to go from a state with more disorder to a state with less. An example:<p>If you take a glass chamber that is partitioned by a removable wall and where one side initially contains a given number N of non-interacting particles with random velocities, whereas the other side is empty. When you remove the wall between the two halves, the particles will start flying around freely in the chamber and will distribute roughly equally in the two halves. Now, the probability that they will again concentrate in only one of the halves of the chamber decreases exponentially with their number (as 2^N), so for macroscopic particle numbers (typically > 10^20) you would have to wait a VERY long time for this to happen. For a small number of particles, or a single nanosphere like in the article, it might well happen though.
When it comes to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, internet discussions are like the old biased coin toss: "Heads the 2nd law is true, Tails the 2nd law is not not true". I wish Karl Popper was still around.
> However, when we zoom into the microscopic world of atoms and molecules, this law softens up and <i>looses</i> its absolute strictness.<p>Hard to take a science article seriously when they write like an 8th grader.