Second law of thermodynamics "broken"

Physicists knew that at atomic scales over very short periods of time, statistical mechanics is pushed beyond its limit, and the second law does not apply. Put another way, situations that break the second law become much more probable.

But the new experiment probed the uncertain middle ground between extremely small-scale systems and macroscopic systems and showed that the second law can also be consistently broken at micron scale, over time periods of up to two seconds.