Laws of the Game [antikvár]

translators' noteIn Laws of the Game, the authors often illustrate a point by referring to games like chess or checkers or backgammon, which are familiar to English-speaking readers. Occasionally, however, they discuss games that are not well known in this country. In these few cases, we have substituted games that illustrate the same points the authors want to make but that will also be instantly recognizable to an American audience. In Chapter 2.1, for example, we have used tic-tac-toe in place of the original's "nine men's morris."Similarly, where the original illustrates a principle with an example drawn from the German language, as in the discussion of entropy in Chapter 8.3, we have adapted the example to English.The authors' system of annotation, which we have retained in the translation, differs from that generally used in this country. Whereas superscript note indicators in the text normally refer to consecutively numbered bibliographical notes that give page numbers as well as bibliographical data for the work in question, here each superscript represents instead the number of a given title in the "List of References" at the end of the book. The reference is only to the work as a whole, not to any specific passage within it; and the same note number is used each time that particular work is cited. Quotations from Hesse's Glass Bead Game, for instance, appear in Chapters 1 and 18.3; and both quotations are followed by the number 3, which refers the reader to that title in the List of References.Robert Kimber Rita KimberForewordThe lay reader interested in the natural sciences is exposed to a constantly rising flood of information. He may often feel himself cast in the role of a judge before whom different authors appear like competing litigants, each of whom hopes to be found in the right. If these authors are sufficiently clever in presenting their cases, the reader may be swayed by each in turn. But then a reviewer appears on the scene and objects that each cannot be as right as the other, particularly when one author's claims are the exact opposite of another's. The reader has no choice but to find the reviewer right, too.This familiar anecdote, which we have slightly adapted to suit our purposes, contains a moral: Everyone could in fact be right if each one did not insist on being the only one to be right.Everything that happens in our world resembles a vast game in which nothing is determined in advance but the rules, and only the rules are open to objective understanding. The game itself is not identical with either its rules or with the sequence of chance happenings that determine the course of play. It is neither the one nor the other because it is both at once. It has as many aspects as we project onto it in the form of questions.