Post Date: 3rd Dec, 2009 - 3:03am / Post ID:
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Powers Magical His Santa How
This very question has baffled scientific minds for decades. We all look at the problems with the idea of Santa flying through the skies and the shear amount of gifts he has to deliver over one night...
QUOTE A Scientific Inquiry into Santa Claus
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, & Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This is due to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits/second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has .001 second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles/household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles; not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding & etc. So Santa's sleigh must be moving at 650 miles/second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles/second. A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles/hour.
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 lb.), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 lb. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see #1) could pull 10 TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with 8, or even 9 reindeer. We need 214,200. This increases the payload - not counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. This is four times the weight of the ocean-liner Queen Elizabeth.
5) 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles/second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat up the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within .00426 of a second. Meanwhile, Santa will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-lb Santa (seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 lb. Of force.
I have wondered the same thing myself, but fortunately through the use of the internet...I have a plausible answer!
QUOTE How will Santa Claus ensure that all the good children receive their presents and once again save Christmas? To clear up this important question, Internet magazine forskning.no has gathered four the country's sharpest researchers: astrophysicist Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard, professor of physics Gaute Einevoll, professor of mathematics Nils Lid Hjort and Elf expert Ane Ohrvik.
They"ve taken the job very seriously.
Ion-shield
If Santa Claus is to deliver all the gifts to all the good children, his sleigh must fly so fast that he would burn up due to air resistance. But it has already been documented that Santa has no problem climbing down a chimney with a fire burning below. So how does Santa solve the problem of heat?
"Santa obviously has an ion-shield of charged particles, held together by a magnetic field, surrounding his entire sleigh. This is how he solves the heat problem," points out Knut Jørgen Røed Oedegaard, who also casts a new light in the night sky:
"There are many meteor showers in December. Many astrophysicists, including apparently serious "celebrity" astrophysicists at the university, who maintain that these lights in the sky are the result of dust particles that burn up as they enter our atmosphere. But this is nonsense, because they ignore the truth: That the lights are the result of Santa Claus moving out of and into the atmosphere as he travels around the globe delivering Christmas presents!"
Oedegaard believes that Santa saves time, energy and air resistance by producing gifts out in space. A new snowboard or doll weights quite little when it is high above the earth.
"Likewise, Santa Claus doesn't travel in our four dimensions (remember that time is the fourth dimension), but makes use of some 11 dimensions. These dimensions make it quite easy to pick up gifts from his warehouse at the North Pole," emphasises Oedegaard, while Nils Lid Hjort and Gaute Einevoll feel that recent string-theory allows for the use of at least 26 dimensions.
The more dimensions, the easier to deliver gifts.
Well...there it is...Santa's Elfs are actually scientific inventors and during the offseason they made Ion-shielded magnetic field protected sleigh and costume. Plus Santa swings in 11 dimensions to elude that nasty time constraint.
There is also another rumour that Santa is a Juicer and that in the offseason Jose Canseco flies up to the North Pole and injects him with roids.
I am going with the ionic/11 dimension theory.
Bottom line...SANTA RULES!
Edited: Vincenzo on 3rd Dec, 2009 - 3:07am