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GUEST
ARTICLE
Santa and the Laws of Physics
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 stocking,
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 0.78 miles per household,
a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to
do what most of us do at least once every 31 hours, plus
feeding, etc.
That means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per
second, 3000 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, at tops 25-30 miles per hour.
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming each child gets nothing more then a medium sized
LEGO set (2 lbs), 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 the "flying reindeer" can
pull TEN TIMES that normal amount, we cannot do the job with
eight, or even nine-we need 214,200 reindeer. This increased
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 HMS Queen Elizabeth. 353,000 tons traveling
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 will absorb
14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per second, each. In short,
they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing
the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic
boom in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths
of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subject to centrifugal
forces of 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 lb.
Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the
back of the sleigh by a 4,315,015 pound force.
In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas
Eve, he's now dead.
--Al Hughes
1timothy4-13.com/files/family/santa.html
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