Accents
Julia Carreon-Lagoc
Is there a Santa Claus?
In my file of floppies are Christmassy bits and this one is a choice pick: a hypothesis about the dearly loved Santa Claus gone kaput. A page from the now defunct, then popular "scientific journal" Spy Magazine flew across the vast cyberspace courtesy of a friend, Justin Skywatcher. It concludes that Santa Claus has long been dead. Now, kiddies, don't cry because there's good news at the end of this column. The so-called study is loaded with statistics to prove the demise of the Holiday icon. Go figure:
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 and 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, thanks 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 per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up 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 per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per 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 per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per 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 pounds), 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 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as space crafts re-entering 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 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
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Justin Skywatcher, he of Mensa fame, gives this sterling rebuttal to Spy Magazine's satirical, albeit funny, claim:
The above analysis is based solely on classical physics and Newtonian mechanics. It leaves out the possible supposition of states allowed by quantum theory. In this case, an object may assume any number of states simultaneously. This of course is only in the absence of an observer which would cause a wave function collapse. Since no one ever sees the REAL Santa Claus at work, this is not a problem. Santa has a secret technique of suppressing the decoherence of the quantum state in macroscopic objects. This permits him to be in as many places at a time as he wishes. Since he takes advantage of quantum tunneling, he is able to pass from one place to another without passing through the space in-between, ala, "beaming down" by Star Trek personnel. However, he is limited to the speed of light. But at 186,240 miles per second, this is well in excess of the speed listed above. This "tunneling" explains how he gains entrance into homes that do not have chimneys.
As for the problem of payload, being able to exist in many places at the same time means Santa need only carry what is necessary for one household at a time. Thus the reindeer need only pull a reasonable weight.
Santa is alive and well and doing quite nicely in spite of pseudoscientific skeptics, thank you.
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Justin Skywatcher's induction/deduction is so beautifully logical and logically beautiful or so it seems. In behalf of the children the world over, thank you for making Santa alive and well. (Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)