Turns out things at the microscopic level can actually rebel against the laws of physics for a bit, refusing to settle down even when they're supposed to.
arXiv · March 16, 2026 · 2603.12285
Why it matters
We usually expect physical systems to move predictably toward stability, like a hot cup of coffee cooling down. This discovery reveals that at microscopic scales, a strange mathematical interference occurs that allows a system to briefly fight against this decay, moving in the 'wrong' direction for a short period of time.
From the abstract
We show that Fisher-regularized Wasserstein gradient flows exhibit a previously unrecognized interference mechanism in their dissipation identity: a cross-dissipation term whose sign becomes positive when the state width falls below a critical scale. In this regime the geometric Fisher channel transiently opposes descent of the baseline free-energy functional, producing what we term the Fisher Paradox. Restricting the flow to the Gaussian manifold yields an exact Riccati-type variance equation w