[meteorite-list] Engineering Christmas

From: Pete Shugar <pshugar_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:40:00 -0600
Message-ID: <CAC85BF670E14ABFB45F9A171E04FF87_at_laptop>

Einstein would give his eye teeth to ride with the jolly
red coat.
Pete

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dark Matter" <freequarks at gmail.com>
To: "Meteorite List" <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2009 6:27 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Engineering Christmas


> Hi All,
>
> Once again, it seems it has befallen upon me uphold the job of official
> Santa
> Physics story reposter. So, in the true spirit of the season, here it
> is yet again.
>
> And as always, I have not checked the math.
>
> 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, OC.
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Received on Sat 19 Dec 2009 07:40:00 PM PST