What the Hell Just Happened?

Einstein famously established the relativity of time. But even his elegant principle and the refinements which have adopted maybe fail to seize time’s true elasticity. There is not any more true check of what we’re tentatively calling the Unified Theory of Relativity than 2021, a 12 months the place moments stretched and collapsed upon one another and made it not possible to gauge if minutes or months have handed.

Consider that this 12 months contained each the rise of the MyPillow man and Joe Manchin, hitherto relative randos within the political ecosystem. Or that JPEGs and GIFs out of the blue obtained hushed reverence often reserved for the Mona Lisa. Or the boat. Remember the boat.

As we chatted with our fellow editors right here about 2021, there have been no scarcity of double checks to make it possible for our recollections weren’t, the truth is, failing. That this 12 months was, the truth is, extraordinarily fucked up and contained extra twists and turns than appeared doable to cram into 525,600 minutes. (Well, technically we nonetheless have a pair extra days to succeed in that mark, however as we’ve already established at this level, time is plastic than earlier theories let on.)

We’ll depart it to scientists to reevaluate their understanding of time as they crunch the numbers from 2021. While they undergo their peer-review machinations, although, right here’s the uncooked knowledge.