Here I will describe recent work that arises from both the study of entanglement and also the development of symmetry principles beyond Noether's theorem. The approach allows us to extend thermodynamic concepts into arbitrarily non-classical regimes and leads to a range of new insights: it shows that quantum systems display a form of disorder at the nanoscale very different from that at macroscopic scales; it allows us to rigorously quantify the effects of quantum coherence in thermodynamic processes; it also provides a quantum information toolkit to extend gauge symmetries in many-body physics beyond Lagrangian formulations. The discussion will be an introduction to these concepts, and so no specialist knowledge of the area is assumed.