Text 754, 115 rader
Skriven 2004-12-13 03:35:34 av Greg Sears (1:153/307)
     Kommentar till en text av PETER KNAPPER
Ärende: Seasons greetings
=========================
 As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help
 from that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I
 am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

 1) 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.

 2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
    BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu,
    Jewish & 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.

 3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with.
    This is due 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/second.

    This is to say that for each Christian household with good
    children, Santa has .001 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/household, a total trip of 75.5 million
    miles; not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least
    once every 31 hours, plus feeding & etc.

    So Santa's sleigh must be moving at 650 miles/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/second.  A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15
    miles/hour.

 4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.
    Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego
    set (2 lb.), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting
    Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.  On land,
    conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 lb.  Even granting
    that "flying reindeer" (see #1) could pull 10 TIMES the normal
    amount, we cannot do the job with 8, or even 9 reindeer.  We need
    214,200.  This increases the payload - not counting the weight of
    the sleigh - to 353,430 tons.
    This is four times the weight of the ocean-liner Queen Elizabeth.

 5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles/second creates enormous air
    resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a
    spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere.  The lead pair of
    reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy.  Per second.
    Each.  In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously,
    exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms
    in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within
    .00426 of a second.  Meanwhile, Santa, will be subjected to
    centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.  A 250-lb.
    Santa (seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his
    sleigh by 4,315,015 lb. of force.

     If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.


 The response to the analysis)


 The analysis you sent me about the death of Santa Claus, based on
 classical physics, is seriously flawed owing to its neglect of
 quantum phenomena that become significant in his particular case.
 As it happens, the terminal velocity of a reindeer in dry December
 air over the Northern Hemisphere (for example) is known with
 tremendous precision.  The mass of Santa and his sleigh (since the
 number of children and their gifts is also known precisely, ahead
 of time, and the reindeer must weigh in minutes before the flight)
 is also known with tremendous precision.  His direction of flight is,
 as you say, essentially east to west.

 All of that, when taken together, means that the momentum vector of
 Mr Claus and his cargo is known with incredible precision.  An
 elementary application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle yields
 the result that Santa's location, at any given moment on Christmas
 Eve, is highly imprecise.  In other words, he is "smeared out" over
 the surface of the earth, analogous to the manner in which an
 electron is "smeared out" within a certain distance from the nucleus
 in an atom.  Thus he can, quite literally, be everywhere at any given
 moment.

 In addition, the relativistic velocities which his reindeer can attain
 for brief moments make it possible for him, in certain cases, to arrive
 at some locations shortly before he left the North Pole.  Santa, in
 other words, assumes for brief periods the characteristics of tachyons.
 I will admit that tachyons remain hypothetical, but then so do black
 holes, and who really doubts their existence anymore?


 Yrs sincerely,

 E.B. Davis, Ph.D.


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