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 Rosa Lichtenstein wrote: 

 Thankyou for you comments, but: 

  
 Hi Rosa, I'm sorry, I don't know what is meant by non-nodal phase change. 

  
 Well, you do, since I gave you several examples. 

 Here is one again: as metals are heated, they change from solid to liquid very slowly, with no boundary between the two phases. 

 Now, you can speed this up (as you noted), but the fact is that some processes in nature are non-nodal. 

 Sure, science has developed since Engels's days, but he expressed his laws in a characteristically a priori manner: 

 Hence it is impossible to alter the quality of a body without addition or subtraction of matter or motion, i.e. without quantitative alteration of the body concerned." 

 [I say 'characteristically' since all dialecticians do the same: i.e., they all impose their a priori schemas on to nature  the whole of Essay Two at my site is devoted to substantiating that seemingly controversial claim.] 

 And, despite the advances in science since his day, dialecticians the world over still make the same claims that Engels did. 

 So, this 'theory' is not sensitive to contrary evidence. It is held onto as a dogma. 

 I think your attempt to see Engels's hand in the development of quantum physics is fanciful, at best  at least as far as foresight is concerned.  

 Engels made so many incorrect claims about nature that by sheer luck one or two might seem to have been on the money. 

 But, this is a highly selective way of looking at science, one shared by fundamentlist christians who view the bible in the same way that dialecticiasn view their holy books. They look only for confirmation, and ignore what they do not like. 

 For example, and in this regard, quantum discontinuity might seem to validate the nodal aspect of change as underlined by Engels, but at the same time it falsifies his view of motion (which has to be continuous to generate his alleged 'contradiction'). So, when an electron, for example, moves between energy levels nodaly as you say, it is not in two places at once, and it is not in and not in one place at one and the same time. 

 Do dialecticians make a note of that? 

 No, just like Christians, they cherry pick. 

 And I think you are mistaken also in thinking I am criticising dialectics as an alternative to logic or science  it isn't. It is far too confused to be an alternative to anything. 

 So, if us Marxists needed a science (or a philosophy, or a logic), dialectics would not even make the reserve list.