Metastability: Deeply misunderstood [Shop Talk: What You Didn’t Learn in School]

It should be easy. The concept is simple enough. Imagine an engineer exactly midway between two free donuts. Ordinarily, our colleague would lunge for the closest one, but in this case each donut is precisely the same distance away. The result: a paralysis known as
metastability
. Although this condition may last for a long time (at least until lunch), any disturbance or jostling of the drooling engineer will cause an imbalance and result in the rapid disappearance of one of the donuts.