Santa

Woof! Merry Christmas Eve!


You may be wondering why I have been posting science posts lately. Well the answer's simple: we are endeavoring to find out how Santa is able to visit every home on earth in a single night. Based on the laws of physics as we know them, logically there is a way he can accomplish this. However, first and foremost, we must take into account a certain degree of magic. Magic does not always line up with science, but we will do our best to co-exist the two. :)


So, what degree of magic are we talking about? We know Santa uses 8 (sometimes 9) Reindeer to pull his sleigh. These reindeer are able to fly, and can pull the sleigh along at incredible heights and speeds. Furthermore, they can pull a fair amount of weight. The bag of toys in the back of the sleigh is usually filled to the brim! Of course, the toyshop, and elves and the lights of the North Pole also are magic, but we are only looking at the sleigh at the moment. There is conjecture on whether the sleigh has any magical properties, but we will assume it is a regular sleigh.


Lets talk numbers. How many presents are there to deliver? There are about 7.2 billion people in the world, and about 320 million people in the United States. Approximately 30% of them are children. Now, there are quite a few people Santa may not deliver presents to as well, for example, Buddhists, Hindu's, or Muslims who don't celebrate Christmas. Some of them do, mind you, but a lot of them don't.
7.2 Billion - 1.6b Muslims - 1b Hindus - .4b Buddhists = 4.2 Billion. Lets take 30% of this number (the children) = 1.26 Billion. Assuming 1 present for each child, this is still a lot of presents! Lets round this down to 1 Billion, both for sanity's sake, and because I have been over-estimating things.


Okay, so we have 1 Billion presents. How much do they weigh? Well, size and weigh can vary wildly. from a deck of playing cards to a bicycle! Lets take some average guesses. For small toys, a good weight may be about 1-3 pounds (action figures, games, etc). For average toys, lets say 5 pounds. For large toys, 15 pounds. Naturally, most items will be in the average category. We'll do a standard weight distributed bell curve, and assign 68 percent to average toys, and 16 percent to small toys, and 16 percent to large toys.
Small toys: .32b pounds
Average toys: 3.4b pounds
Large toys: 2.4b pounds
So the entire pile of presents will weigh about 6.1 Billion pounds or so. This is beginning to sound like a lot of presents! Let's assume the sleigh will hold 2400 pounds of presents per trip (yes, Santa will be making multiple trips). If this is the case, it will take him about 2.5 million trips. Even with our physics in play, this seems a little extravagant. But wait! Isn't Santa's bag magic? Why yes it is! He pulls all sorts of things out of that bag that clearly might not fit in there otherwise. Let's say it can reduce size and weight by 100 times. Dividing our number by 100, that means Santa will need to make 25,416 trips. Still a lot of trips, but much more manageable.


Now lets look at the physics lessons we have been talking about:
When talking about dimensions, we mentioned that time can be construed as a 4rth dimension, that is to say, we travel through time (usually ahead in time, but I digress). Our second article was about relativity, that is to say, can we travel forward or backwards through time at varying rates? Technically, yes, but this is difficult to impossible to travel backwards in time, but we can slow our passage through time by reaching close to relativistic speeds. Sadly, this doesn't help us, because we want to slow earth's time, to make the night longer for Santa to deliver the presents. Well how about wormholes? This is where we can get some help. Wormholes are mostly theoretical, and take enormous amounts of energy. But they can set up a waypoint, so to speak, where one can travel ahead in time, go into the wormhole, and come back out in the past when the wormhole was created. And Santa has magic. He creates two of these wormholes using solar energy, and the northern lights to make one at the North Pole, and one at the South pole. He is able to use these to make one trip, then drop in the south pole wormhole, and appear again in the North Pole wormhole to make the second trip, and so on and so forth. This is also why Santa may appear to be in many places at once, because he is traversing the same span of time multiple times. Using this approach, it would take him roughly 5.7 years to finish one Christmas run! That is one busy guy!


Merry Christmas Everyone!
Woof!


ps: sorry about the delay in posting this, hope you enjoy anyway!