PHYSICS TAKES THE FUN OUT OF CHRISTMAS
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the
world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim,
Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this
reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378
million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average
(census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million
homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the
Different time zone and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to
west(which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child,
Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump
down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents
under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up
the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house. Assuming
that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the
earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the
purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per
household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom
stops or breaks. This means 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, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4
miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles
per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two
pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting
Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than
300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times
the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of
them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload,
not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly
seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the
monarch). A mass of nearly 600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per
second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer
in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere.
The lead pair of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy
per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost
instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating
deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be
vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time
Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters,
however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to
650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of
17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim considering
all the high calorie snacks he must have consumed over the years) would
be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force,
instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering
blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry
Christmas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 20 2003 - 12:11:31 EDT