Sunday Times 2
The science of Father Chrtistmas
He’s making a list, and checking it twice, to find out who has been naughty and nice.
But Santa might also want to jot down a few equations and sums, as he’ll need to grapple with the laws of physics come Christmas Eve.
Of course, it’s unlikely Santa has to deal with the rules of science in quite the same way as regular people, but he might want to take a glance or two at the task awaiting him on his trip this year.
Santa will have to overcome the laws of science when he makes his journey around the world from the North Pole on Christmas Eve (illustration of Santa and his reindeer shown). Calculations reveal the incredible speeds he will need to attain - 3,000 times the speed of sound
For starters, assuming that Santa doesn’t handle certain faiths, he’ll have about 378 million children to deliver to in a fairly short time frame, according to one scientist.
Thankfully, due to the rotation of Earth he’ll have a good 31 hours to deliver presents – rather than just 24 – assuming he’s flying East to West to match Earth’s rotation.
With a further assumption of their being 3.5 children in each household, based on the average census rate, that leaves him with 91.8 million homes to visit.
That leaves him with 822.6 visits per second to cope with, requiring a stay of about one thousandth of a second to deliver presents to each home.
All in all, Santa’s sleigh will need to move about 650 miles (1,050km) per second, which is 3,000 times the speed of sound or 0.35 per cent the speed of light.
At such a speed it’s Santa may start to feel the effects of relatiivty, especially time dilation, causing him to age very slightly slower than the rest of the people on Earth – perhaps partially explaining his perpetual ability to deliver presents at Christmas.
The sleigh will also have a sizable number of presents on board, further complicating matters.
Considering each child is receiving a present no more than 2lbs (0.9kg) in weight, the sleigh would still weigh more than 320,000 tons – just shy of the weight of the Empire State Building, 370,000 tons.
An average reindeer on Earth can pull only 300 pounds (135kg), so in this scenario 214,200 reindeer would be needed.
Of course, considering these are flying reindeer, they may well be able to handle heavier loads.
But with the weight and speed of the sleigh, it appears that the front two reindeer – Dasher and Dancer, until Rudolph’s inclusion – will be subjected to 13.4 quintillion joules of energy per second.
This will cause them to burst into flames almost immediatelyafter taking flight. The entire reindeer team, assuming only eight are used, would be vapourised in 4.26 thousandths of a second.
However, in rebuttals to Miss Harden’s research, other scientists pointed out a few inconsistencies that might make his job a bit easier.
Jim Mantle from Waterloo Maple Software pointed out that Santa wouldn’t necessarily have to visit all 91.8 million homes in one night.
‘Santa would have to Fedex a number of packages ahead of time, since he would not be able to fly into Air Force Bases, or into tower-controlled areas near airports,’ he explained, so those homes could be subtracted.
And another unnamed scienists said that such flying reindeer might have more power than we think owing to a ‘dominant gene sequence within the reindeer DNA strand.’
Meanwhile, last year a team of scientists from The Big Bang UK Young Scientists and Engineers Fair said he eat 150 billion calories in milk and mince pies if he accepted all the snacks on offer at various home.
And the total expenditure on all of the presented needed would be around £280 billlion ($440 billion) – which is £30 billion ($47 billion) more than his home country of Finland.
Spare a thought for the elves as well; 3,000 of them need to work eight hours a day around the clock, for the whole year, in order to get enough presents for every good child.
So however Santa Claus plans to get all his presents delivered this year, we hope he’s taken a look at the science accordingly.
© Daily Mail, London