metastability

metastability

English

Etymology

meta- +‎ stability

Noun

metastability (countable and uncountable, plural metastabilities)

1. An unstable but potentially long-lived state of a system; for example, a supersaturated solution or an excited atom.
   • 1989, Irving Singer The Nature of Love

     Soloman's belief that love is necessarily paradoxical issues from his attempt to define it as what Sartre would call a dialectical metastability. Love must therefore be not a "state of the union but a never ending conflict of pushing away and pulling together."

Derived terms

• metastable

Translations

unstable but potentially long-lived state

French: métastabilité (fr) f