[meteorite-list] OT: Tis the Season... again

From: Zelimir Gabelica <Zelimir.Gabelica_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 16:18:48 +0100
Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20061214161121.034a1e70_at_pop.univ-mulhouse.fr>

Hi Martin, all,

I have a friend here, Serge (not our "meteorite" Serge) who enjoyed the
Santa conundrum and here is his reply (to consider the way you feel or can).

Of course, he must know something about physics... But not especially
about relativity....
You just must keep in mind there is anopther solution for him:
ubiquity.
Imagine him being capable of dividing his wave function by one million : he
would become one million fold ubiquitous . By the way, his weight could thus
be expressed in terms of milligrams, and the forces related to the huge
accelerations would be decreased by a factor by one trillion (one million
to the square !!!!), since ubiquity would not only reduce his weight, but
also the velocity required for visiting all the children the same night...
The limits are in our brains, not in physics !!!
Enjoy the comment,
Sincerely yours,
Serge

Note that in the French version of that statement (also circulating in the
late 1990's) the conclusion was:
Santa probably does not exist. And if he ever existed, now he should be dead...

Best,

Zelimir


A 09:48 13/12/2006 -0700, Martin Horejsi a ?crit :
>Greetings all,
>
>Seems that we have a new crop of List viewers this season so I thought
>I'd repost a Christmas conundrum that has puzzled me in the past.
>Since this story was borrowed from somewhere, original reference long
>lost, I again give my disclaimer: I didn't check the math, so use this
>story at your own risk.
>
>Merry Christmas!
>
>Martin
>
>
>
>
>Engineering Christmas: some points of contention
>
>1.
>There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the
>world. However, since Santa does not generally visit children of
>non-Christian 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 home.
>
>
>2.
>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 around 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 breaks. This means 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, the Ulysses space probe,
>moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and conventional reindeer can
>run (at best) 32 miles per hour.
>
>
>3.
>The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that
>each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (about 2
>pounds), the
>sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tons, not counting Santa himself. On
>land a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even
>granting that the" flying " reindeer could pull ten times the normal
>amount, the job can't be done with eight or 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).
>
>Of course then, 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
>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 vaporized 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
>centrifugal forces of 17,500 G's. 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 blob of goo. And yet, he returns year
>after year.
>
>
>5.
>Therefore, the rules of Newtonian physics obviously don't apply to Santa
>and his
>yearly mission. Speaking as an engineer, this guy must know something about
>relativity that the rest of us have yet to discover.
>
>HO, HO, HO.
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Prof. Zelimir Gabelica
Universit? de Haute Alsace
ENSCMu, Lab. GSEC,
3, Rue A. Werner,
F-68093 Mulhouse Cedex, France
Tel: +33 (0)3 89 33 68 94
Fax: +33 (0)3 89 33 68 15
Received on Thu 14 Dec 2006 10:18:48 AM PST