Metastability
WordNet
noun
(1) 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
WiktionaryText
Noun
- 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."
- 1989, Irving Singer The Nature of Love