Does Einstein's discomfort with quantum theory make him less a candidate for Person of the Century? Not by much. His own work contributed greatly to quantum theory and to the semiconductor revolution it spawned. And his belief in the existence of a unified field theory could well be proved right in the new century.

More important, he serves as a symbol of all the scientists — such as Heisenberg, Bohr, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, even the ones he disagreed with — who built upon his work to decipher and harness the forces of the cosmos. As James Gleick wrote earlier this year in the TIME 100 series, "The scientific touchstones of our age — the Bomb, space travel, electronics — all bear his fingerprints." Or, to quote a TIME cover story from 1946 (produced by Whittaker Chambers): "Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition and imagination which are rarely combined in one mind, but which, when they do occur together, men call genius. It was all but inevitable that this genius should appear in the field of science, for 20th-Century civilization is first & foremost technological."

Einstein's theory of relativity not only upended physics, it also jangled the underpinnings of society. For nearly three centuries, the clockwork universe of Galileo and Newton — which was based on absolute laws and certainties--formed the psychological foundation for the Enlightenment, with its belief in causes and effects, order, rationalism, even duty.

Now came a view of the universe in which space and time were all relative. Indirectly, relativity paved the way for a new relativism in morality, arts and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space but also of truth and morality. "It formed a knife," historian Paul Johnson says of relativity theory, "to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings." Just as Darwinism became, a century ago, not just a biological theory but also a social theology, so too did relativity shape the social theology of the 20th century.

The effect on arts can be seen by looking at 1922, the year that Einstein won the Nobel Prize, James Joyce published Ulysses and T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land. There was a famous party in May for the debut of the ballet Renard, composed by Stravinsky and staged by Diaghilev. They were both there, along with Picasso (who had designed the sets), Proust (who had been proclaimed Einstein's literary interpreter) and Joyce. The art of each, in its own way, reflected the breakdown of mechanical order and of the sense that space and time were absolutes.

In early 1933, as Hitler was taking power, Einstein immigrated to the U.S., settling in Princeton as the world's first scientific supercelebrity. That year he help found a group to resettle refugees, the International Rescue Committee. Thus he became a symbol of another of the great themes of the century: how history was shaped by tides of immigrants, so many of them destined for greatness, who fled oppressive regimes for the freedom of democratic climes.

As a humanist and internationalist, Einstein had spent most of his life espousing a gentle pacifism, and he became one of Gandhi's foremost admirers. But in 1939 he signed one of the century's most important letters, one that symbolizes the relationship between science and politics. "It may become possible to set up nuclear chain reactions," he wrote President Roosevelt. "This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs." When Roosevelt read the letter, he crisply ordered, "This requires action."

Roosevelt, Gandhi, Einstein. Three inspiring characters, each representing a different force of history in the past century. They were about as different as any three men are likely to be. Yet each in his own way, both intentionally and not, taught us the century's most important lesson: the value of being both humble and humane.

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