Metastability
noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 An unstable but potentially long-lived state of a system; for example, a supersaturated solution or an excited atom. countable, uncountable
"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.""
- 2 the quality of a physical system that persists in its existing equilibrium when undisturbed (or only slightly disturbed) but able to pass to a more stable equilibrium when sufficiently disturbed wordnet
Example
More examples"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.""
Etymology
From meta- + stability.
Related phrases
More for "metastability"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.