If there is one equation even the most mathematically challenged can recite, it has to be E=mc2. If scientific genius has a human face, it has to be that of Albert Einstein, the unruly-haired man who fared badly in the classroom yet revolutionised not just science but also the way mankind has since perceived reality. And if the much publicised search for the most worthy among the men and women who have contributed in full measure to this century at an end had threatened to dissolve into irreconcilable quibbles, Time magazine's choice of Einstein cannot be faulted.Certainly, men like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi impacted generations in India and abroad. But poised on the brink of an aesthetically enthralling change of date, it cannot be argued that this was a century defined by quantum physics. It all started in 1905 when Einstein shattered the certainties offered by a Newtonian worldview in a slew of scientific papers, following this up ten years later with his intellectual feat, the general theory ofrelativity.That set the foundation and the pace as he and an array of scientists especially in the pre-World War II decades defined the structure of this scientific revolution with breathtaking speed. They delved simultaneously into scientific secrets harboured in the tiny electron and the vast universe beyond. It is a different matter that Einstein in the end could never quite reconcile himself to the overwhelming uncertainties that crisscrossed the atomic world being mapped by the likes of Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg and famously protested, ``God does not play dice.'' And even if it was still a world divided into the two cultures, even if scientists had not yet started penning bestsellers to familiarise laymen with the inexorable march of science, the arts were not untouched. With Einstein conclusively shattering any notion of an absolute frame of reference, with the Uncertainty Principle rendering all quantum measurements hostage to probability, old positivist impulses in the social sciences toogave way. Storytelling was no longer a beginning-middle-end affair, historical and sociological inquiries were no longer defined by easy linearities. And, of course, with the atomic bomb the most tangible legacy of Einstein's flashes of brilliance, old certainties about the future of the world as we know it too melted away.And now, as humanity struggles with new imponderables posed by the dawn of the biotech century, one wonders how Einstein would have reacted to the raucous battle between votaries and opponents of genetic manipulation? For, it is this parallel that best illustrates the signal contribution of this grandfather-like figure. He may have humbly said, ``My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born and that is all that is necessary.'' Later-day biographers may have exhumed remains of that life for prurient details, others may be deconstructing his brain to determine the building blocks of genius, but the message of this unique life lies in hisunrelenting effort to fuse morality and the progress of science.
