In electronics, a circuit that oscillates continuously between two states without staying in either one; having no stable equilibrium.
From Greek a- 'not' plus stable (Latin stabilis 'firm, steady'). The term was coined in early electronics to describe circuits that never rest.
An astable circuit is like a bouncing ball that never comes to rest—it keeps flipping between on and off thousands of times per second, and that's exactly why it's used to create the clock pulses that make computers work at all!
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