A common thread throughout the history of thermodynamics is the goal of understanding the design principles of efficient machines and setting bounds and limits on what is possible. One of the first steam engines, the Newcomen engine (~1712), took up the space of an entire building. As technology progressed, the machines we could build kept getting smaller. Today we can build micro and nanoscopic devices such as molecular machines, quantum dots, and quantum circuits.
The vast difference in scales from classical thermodynamic devices to stochastic and quantum systems means that the rules of the game have changed, making the previously impossible possible. Three examples of this are: 1. microscopic violations of the second law, which only holds on average, 2. real implementations of Maxwell's demon, 3. Heat engines performing beyond the Carnot limit.
Despite the added complexity, stochastic and quantum thermodynamics have given us some of the biggest theoretical advancements to a major field of physics, revolutionizing the second law with fluctuation theorems and explaining thought provoking paradoxes like Maxwell's demon and the Mpemba effect. We employ the methods of thermodynamics to advance our knowledge of stochastic and quantum systems, describe disordered driven materials for quantum circuits and gravitational wave detectors, and understand the design principles of efficient nanoscopic devices.