metastability

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English

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Etymology

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From meta- +‎ stability.

Noun

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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

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Translations

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