[meteorite-list] OT: Santa Physics Concerns

From: Martin Horejsi <accretiondesk_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Dec 12 14:33:06 2005
Message-ID: <9c2f96d20512121132m1159a4e7w9f633c890b9662b2_at_mail.gmail.com>

Hi All,

I stumbled across this somewhere a while ago. I'm sure many of you
have seen it, or something like it, but if not, it's worth
considering.

I have not checked the math, but I guess it really doesn't matter.

Enjoy.

Martin


Engineering Christmas: Some points of contention.

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 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 that there is at
least one good child in each dwelling.

Santa has about 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 967.7
visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household
with a good child, Santa has about 1/1000th of a second to park the
sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, 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 on
to 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 purpose 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 other breaks.

This requires that Santa's sleigh moves at 650 miles per second--3000
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 conventional reindeer can run at best 30 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 500,000 tons, not counting Santa
himself. On land a conventional reindeer can pull about 300 pounds.
Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the
normal amount, the job just cannot be done with eight or nine of
them-- Santa would need 360,000 reindeer!

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).

4.600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance-- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as
spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere (which may explain
Rudolph's red nose). The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3
quintillion joules of energy per second. In short, they would
instantaneously vaporize exposing the reindeer behind them to the same
friction and also creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The
entire reindeer team would vanish 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 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be
subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 Gs. A 250 pound Santa (which
seems ludicrously slim) 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 red-hot blob of goo. And yet, he returns
year after year.

Therefore, the rules of physics obviously don't apply to Santa and his
yearly mission. Speaking as an engineer, this guy must know something
about relativity that we have yet to discover.

HO, HO, HO.
Received on Mon 12 Dec 2005 02:32:31 PM PST