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The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer

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Jcrowley Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-25-06 02:04 PM
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The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer
The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer

No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total — 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75½ million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that 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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/physics.asp
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BlueJazz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-25-06 02:23 PM
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1. At first glance, this sounds Logical,,...But Santa also possesses a device..
Edited on Mon Dec-25-06 02:24 PM by BlueJazz
...known as "The Quantum Warp-Time Correlator"
He receive this gift many, many years ago when an Alien Race
(known as the "Zatorials) had the misfortune of having to land
on Earth, due to an Warp-Engine Failure.
Since the Zatorials are extremely cold sensitive, they were near death when
Santa found them and carried them (in his sleigh) back to his modest
Shop.....
He nursed them back to Health..helped repair their ship and the rest is History...
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TheMadMonk Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-25-06 03:41 PM
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2. Santa is indeed quantum.
He becomes a quantum probability cloud and visits all children simultaneously. His actual position is indeterminate unless observed, just like a sub-atomic particle's. Any child who remains awake to see Santa, locally collapses the superposition of Santa states, and to preserve Christmas, THAT home is one where Santa isn't and that child gets no presents.
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