something my physics teacher showed us in class, #4 and 5 are the best
The Physics Behind Santa Claus
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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.
-
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.
-
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, 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.
-
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.
-
353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in
the same fashion as spacecrafts 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.
