First of all, I believe in Santa. When I was young, my mom told me that he exists and I I’m a good son. I believe my mom and you should too.
But, that said, I’m also a scientist. Santa has to do some pretty remarkable things every Christmas which must involve some sort of cutting-edge science and technology. That’s clear, once you calculate such things like how fast he’d have to move, how much weight he’d have to carry, the amount of cookies he’d have to consume, the accelerations he’d have to experience, and all that sort of stuff. When you run the numbers, it’s all pretty impressive. I’m surprised the military doesn’t have the elves working on technology for them. (Or do they? There’s Area 51 – but we’ll get to that later.)
A day is 24 hours long, dusk to dusk, but night in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere is thirteen and a half hours, so Santa has 37.5 hours to work with, but that’s not a lot of time to:
1. Visit every household on Earth that celebrates Christmas and has kids that believe in Santa Claus.
2. Get down the chimney.
3. Drop off a couple of pounds of presents per each kid.
4. Eat at least one cookie per household and drink some milk. And, of course, at my house, a piece of pizza and a beer “Because Daddy knows what Santa likes.” (My kids won’t be traumatized by that, am I right?)
5. Oh, yeah, and get nine tiny members of the species of Rangifer tarandus to fly. Can’t forget that one.
Making some very simplified assumptions about how these households are spread over the world, you find that Santa has to move at speeds over a hundred miles per second. That’s faster than a meteor hitting the atmosphere. Moving at these speeds would heat up the sleigh and reindeer enough to incinerate them, not to mention the inevitable sonic boom. And Santa has about a thousandth of a second to park the sleigh, do everything in steps 1 – 4, and then move on to the next house…all the while doing it quietly enough to not wake up the children all nestled snugly in their beds.
The chimney thing is hard. Santa has to somehow shrink to pass through it and then there’s the fact that a lot of households don’t have chimneys anymore. There’s no two ways around it. Santa has to be able to walk through walls. That’s a problem.
The load of presents amounts to about 300,000 tons. If the presents had the density of water, that would be a cube about 200 feet on a side. That’s obviously bigger than the version of Santa’s sleigh we see in television shows, so we have to figure out a way to both squish the size of the presents AND handle the fact that it’s an awful lot of weight to move around.
The cookie and milk thing is important, because who doesn’t like cookies? But they pose a real problem. That many cookies comprise about twenty billion calories and…ballpark…three thousand tons. And that totally ignores the carrot for Rudolph.
So, what’s a jolly elf to do?
The speed thing is a real concern, although we know of things that move faster than Santa would have to. Of course, this would invoke some of Einstein’s odd relativistic effects, like time dilation and stuff like that. And, of course, there’s the issue of Santa and the sleigh getting incinerated in a loud sonic boom. It would be much better if the travel were instantaneous.
We do know of a physics phenomenon that seems to involve something approximating infinite speed. This is occurs in quantum mechanics when a measurement occurs. The quantum phenomenon Santa might employ is called quantum entanglement. That’s when two subatomic particles are created at the same time so that their properties are inextricably linked. You can then separate the two particles by a long distance and then look at one of them. When you do, the properties of the other are instantaneously determined. This is the basis of what is called quantum teleportation, which has been demonstrated in the laboratory.
It’s a stretch (and, let’s face it, what isn’t a stretch about this article?), but maybe Santa could be entangled with subatomic particles that are sent by drone to every household on the planet. Then, in a series of quantum measurements of Santa still at the North Pole, the subatomic particles could collapse into a Santa in people’s living rooms to deliver the presents. There’s still the problem of moving fast inside the house without waking the kids, but it’s a start. And this approach solves the whole issue of a team of reindeer incinerating as they fly across the sky.
Solving the cookie conundrum is perhaps easier. After all, we know from E = mc2 that matter can be converted into energy and maybe we’ve simply gotten the lore down wrong. Maybe Santa doesn’t actually eat the cookies, but rather uses them to power his whole operation. The energy content of a single gram of cookie has the energy equivalent of the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. Multiply that by all of the cookies Santa collects and you’ve got a lot of energy. I’m thinking about the final scene in “Back to the Future,” where Doc Brown grabs some garbage to power the time machine. Santa is more refined than Doc Brown, but is it just by mistake that they both have long white hair? I think not.
Getting reindeers to fly would have to incorporate some sort of antigravity device, but there’s dark energy, which is a repulsive form of gravity that was discovered in 1998. It doesn’t quite operate in the way we’d hope antigravity would but work with me here. Scientists are still learning about dark energy. Maybe it will lead to Rudolph and his red nose.
Finally, and I may be revealing some national secrets here, you probably noticed that these imaginary technologies would be of great help to the world’s militaries and, if Santa’s secrets were revealed to America’s enemies, it could be a national crisis. I think this is probably why grownups deny Santa Claus. It keeps the spies from looking too deeply into it. But I think there was probably a slipup back in 1947, when Santa’s elves were doing some sort of dry run of Santa’s sleigh, and something got out of control and the sleigh crashed at Roswell. While the military denies it, there were reports of small bodies found in the crash. Elves are also small. You see where I’m going with this. But you didn’t hear it from me.
You go about the busy holiday season, rushing here and there, remember that Santa has it way harder than you do. He couldn’t do it without some of these advanced technologies, and probably more. We haven’t begun to talk about how such a huge mass of toys get transported, and it would be irresponsible of me to speak of it publicly. (It’s probably wormholes. There. I said it. What else could it be?)
But better not to dwell on the technology and enjoy the magic of the season. No matter what holiday you celebrate, I hope they are a joyous time for you, and, in the spirit of Santa, which transcend all cultures – Merry Christmas to
#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/the-science-of-santa-v2-0/
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