[Looks like this engineer had nothing better to do with his time, so he came
up with a mathematical proof for the non-existence of 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 and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 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, 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 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding 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.
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), 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 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the
sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5) 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering 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 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to
centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.
The best proof of love is trust. - Joyce Brothers
Science is the record of dead religions. - Oscar Wilde
The engineering is secondary to the vision. - Cynthia Ozick
Architecture begins where engineering ends. - Walter Gropius
Fame is proof that the people are gullible. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The writer is the engineer of the human soul. - Joseph Stalin
You can't blame gravity for falling in love. - Albert Einstein
Death and taxes are unsolved engineering problems. - Romana Machado
There would be no Christmas if there was no Easter. - Gordon B. Hinckley
Marketing isn't magic. There is a science to it. - Dan Zarrella
When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction. - Steven Wright
Halloween starts earlier and earlier, just like Christmas. - Robert Englund
I'm going to the North Pole to help out Santa this year. - Jimmy Fallon
It is the proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob. - Seneca
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability. - William Osler
In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting. - Lord Kelvin
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. - Albert Einstein
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. - Albert Einstein
I know that this defies the law of gravity, but, you see, I never studied law. - Bugs Bunny
Mail your packages early, so the Post Office can lose them in time for Christmas. - Johnny Carson
The very best proof that something can be done is that someone has already done it. - Bertrand Russell
Aren't we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas? You know, the birth of Santa. - Bart Simpson
Genetic Engineering: A recent attempt to formalize what farmers have been doing all along. - Unknown
Mathematics is the cheapest science. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and a paper. - George Polya
The Bermuda Triangle got tired of warm weather. It moved to Alaska. Now Santa Claus is missing. - Steven Wright
Science is angling in the mud - angling for immortality and for anything else that may turn up. - Aldous Huxley
I still have my Christmas Tree. I looked at it today. Sure enough, I couldn't see any forests. - Steven Wright
Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one. - Konrad Lorenz
I gave my young nephew a book for Christmas. He's spent six months looking for where to put the batteries. - Milton Berle
Statistics: the only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions. - Evan Esar
Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true. - Bertrand Russell
Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten. - Neil A Armstrong
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
So long as the mother, ignorance, lives, it is not safe for science, the offspring, to divulge the hidden cause of things. - Johannes Kepler
True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections of the One who cannot lie. - A.W. Tozer
Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings. - Helen Keller
It's a good thing we have gravity or else when birds died they'd just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused. - Steven Wright
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite. - Thomas Sowell
Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house. - Henri Poincare
see also Christmas & Engineering Sections
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25-Jan-2021 |