gould dies at 60 by Davies, Daniel 22 May 2002 06:16 UTC
>(Thus water after it is heated up gradually, >suddenly begins to boil. If you're going to show this book to people who are of a pedantic disposition, you might want to find a different example. This isn't true of water, which gradually approaches boiling point along its boiling curve. Boiling is the limit of a process whereby the heat lost from evaporation increases as a liquid is heated; it's the point on the boiling curve at which the heat loss from evaporation exceeds the heat applied, if I remember O-level physics right. The freezing of water as it is gradually cooled is much more like the discontinuous process you want; supercritical liquids can freeze all in an instant. But liquids come to the boil gradually. ^^^^^^^ CB: On the boiling, in part it is the literal change in the quality of the surface of the water, from smooth to bubbling, as observed by looking. This occurs in a leap at 212 degrees farenheit. The gradual increase in temperature with only slight surface perturbations is a necessary part of the dialectical understanding. I'm not sure what you mean by water gradually approaching its boiling point along its boiling curve. If more heat is added to it faster it will approach its boiling point faster. For example, if you drop a bomb in some water, some of it will boil immediately. The dialectical pattern is that if as the heat is added gradually from 32 degrees ( where is becomes liquid; that change from solid to liquid is a dialectical qualitative change too) to 211 degrees, the surface jiggles but it doesn't bubble. At 212, it leaps into much bigger bubbles, without any leap in the rate at which the heat is added to it. In other words, gradually adding heat eventually results in a non-gradual change in the quality of the shape of the surface of the water. Dialectics is not all leaps or suddenness anymore than all gradualness. It is gradual change punctuated by sudden change, both. In Engels terminology, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vica versa.
