EDITORIAL.

HIS picture adorns T-shirts and billboards. His legendary genius to this day inspires awe.

For those reasons and more, Albert Einstein was selected as Time magazine's Person of the Century.

With so much emphasis placed on good looks and being wealthy at the end of this century, it seems striking that Einstein possessed neither.

Time called Einstein the ``kindly, absent-minded professor whose wild halo of hair, piercing eyes, engaging humanity and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius.''

It's also striking that few people today, especially schoolchildren, could explain Einstein's theory of relativity. Certainly, we don't feel qualified to expand on how E=mc2 led to the creation of everything from the atom bomb to television.

Born in Germany in 1879, Einstein supposedly had trouble in school until the day he was doodling on a piece of paper and decided motion, speed and mass appear different, depending on the observer's frame of reference.

Some people might wonder if he was on drugs at the time. Some might think he just got lucky.

At any rate, this century was definitely shaped by the Cold War and television, and many scientific discoveries are based on the intellectual breakthroughs of Einstein's mind, so it is fitting that he should be Person of the Century a century so dominated by the transformation of Earth by science.

Were he alive today, we're sure the man who won the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics would say it's all relative.