Why Engineers should not explain Santa Clause to Children

It is time to come clean about this Santa thing from a physics perspective.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas Eve to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth. This is assuming that he travels East to West. Assume that Santa only visits households that believe in Santa Claus, which are estimated, for this study, to number 91,802,160 (Average household of 2.3 of estimated 2.1 Billion people who celebrate Christmas).

It is also assumed, without supporting evidence, that each of these households contains at least one “good” little boy or girl.

This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each household with good children, Santa has 1/1000 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 what ever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, 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 0.78 miles per household for a total trip of 71.6 Million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 miles, plus feeding and other logistics concerning reindeer operations.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second which is 3000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second.

The payload of 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 invariable described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” can pull TEN times the normal weight, Santa can’t do the job with eight, or even nine, reindeer. He would need 214,200 reindeer.

In any case, this increases the total load to be moved, not counting the weight of the sleigh, to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison, this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner.

353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat up the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft’s reentering the atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will each absorb 14.3 Quintillion joules of energy, per second. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 0.00426th of a second.

Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to deceleration forces 17,500.6 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) will be subjected to a force of 4,375,015 pounds.

In conclusion, if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he did it once and he’s dead now. :scaredeyes:

<snicker>

 

Boy, you know nothing about magic. Once twink of the old nose and time stops. Nuff said

 

There is a fundamental flaw in your calculcations. All physic proofs are based on mathmatics. Mathmatics is a structure of "rules" and "measures" which are as arbitrary as anything else made by man. Also figure in the truth that any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indestinguishable from Magick.

There fore, mathmatics is magick and, therefore, so are any "science" based on it. Magick is what allows Santa to do his gig.

So, guess who's getting coal this year?

 

Wait. Are you saying there is no Santa???

NNNNOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!