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