[jpollock]

Look into "Chaos Theory", "Control Theory" and "Damping".

In particular, consider how you would damp an undesired movement by a satellite. A naive approach would be to apply thrust in the opposite direction. However, the control can't be exact, leading to thrust -> thrust <- over and over, eventually to the measurement limit of the thruster's control.

With a large mass, it's replaced with a spring, and converted to heat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping

[pyinstallwoes]

Hm, sounds like a fun oscillator algorithm to try for a synthesizer!