Einstein’s System pipe

Kapp & Peterson is the only pipe maker I'm aware of that's ever employed a philosophical advertising slogan, one they actively used from 1905 until the 1980s: “The Thinking Man Smokes A Peterson Pipe.” For many pipemen, sooner or later the slogan will trigger a memory of Socrates’s words: the unexamined life is not worth living (ὁ ... ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ). To apply to pipe smoking the idea of the pursuit of wisdom through query and logical reasoning is surely one mark of Charles Peterson’s genius. Another is his application of it to the Patent System, which says something about himself (he declared himself a Free Thinker in the Irish Census) as well as his work. Aside from Socrates, the greatest example of the thinking man in world culture has to be Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist (1879-1955). Everyone knows his Special Theory of Relativity—E = mc2—Energy equals mass times the speed of light (in a vacuum) squared. We’ve all learned, as Chuck Stanion says, “that space and time are not individual phenomena; they are interconnected elements of a four-dimensional space/time continuum.” And long before we leave school we know Einstein’s maxim that “Mass and energy are merely different manifestations of the same thing.” Of course, you could’ve deduced that simply by watching the tobacco burn in your pipe, right? There have been other great scientists before and since, but I suspect Einstein has become such an exemplar of the thinking man has to do with more than his genius. It also involves his humanity, humility and wisdom. He admired and almost met Mahatma Gandhi; he was a violinist who could perform Mozart and Beethoven sonatas; he was well-read in philosophy and the arts and deeply democratic in his views. Of course he won the Nobel Prize. He campaigned for world disarmament, believing the arms race in his day was not merely economically damaging but spiritually devastating. And of course, he smoked a pipe.Rick Newcombe, the “Apostle of Pipes” as I like to call him, points out Einstein’s increasing importance to us as pipe smokers in his classic essay from Reason magazine: The end of the last century saw the birth of two Germans who will be famous for eternity:  Adolf Hitler, the bloodthirsty dictator, and Albert Einstein, the peace-loving genius scientist.  Both men held strong views on the subject of smoking, and it is worth examining their opinions . . . . Hitler was a zealot about many things, so it is not surprising to discover that he was an extremist on the subject of smoking.  He was a militant anti-smoker.  He regarded smoking as vile and disgusting.  According to Time magazine, “Adolf Hitler was a fanatical opponent of tobacco.” He was fond of proclaiming that women of the Third Reich did not smoke at all, even though many of them did.  Richard Klein, in his fascinating book Cigarettes Are Sublime, wrote that Hitler was “a fanatically superstitious hater of tobacco smoke.” Einstein, on the other hand,…