Santa’s Miracle, Uncovered!

Grudging respect or not, on the face of it such an achievement is simply impossible; so there must more to it, right?

Indeed there is, and Albert Einstein provides the answers! While worrying about unimportant things, such as real science, Einstein unknowingly stumbled upon the solution to Santa’s miracle! This astounding breakthrough should never be overlooked (though often is) and, despite what you may hear, is without a doubt the most impressive application of both Special and General Relativity, and of the other less well known theory called Al’s Idiocy.

In total there are three relativistic principles that assist Santa in his work (all totally inaccessible to mortals like us), and I dare to list them below:

Unfortunately, due to the fact that I don’t even understand the concepts myself, I am restricted in just how much detail I can go into… but hey, the ideas sound plausible enough and, let’s face it, how else could Santa visit 13′000 houses per second?

1 – Time dilation: just a cool name for the idea that time passes at different rates depending on your velocity. So if Santa speeds around the globe at about the speed of light (and avoids setting fire to the atmosphere as a result of frictional heating… so now we know why Rudolph’s nose is so red!) then time pretty much stands still for him. Okay, I have it backwards right? This only works if time stands still for us, gaining Santa “extra” time, not the other way round.

Perhaps, though, Santa has a special sleigh and it is not him that moves at all, but the rest of the world? That way we’d all be flung around Santa at high speed and feel an infinitesimal passage of time; Santa could easily (!) turn this to his advantage! The detrimental effects of near infinite g-force could pose a problem, but I’m sure a little technical sophistry could get around that, thus Time Dilation extends the length of Santa’s night, from our point of view…!

2 – Principle of Simultaneity: the idea whereby things that appear to happen at the same time to one person may not appear to do so from the viewpoint of another. Again, this is normally a result of high speed but I’m sure a resourceful Santa could find a way to play with it -such that even if he visited one house after another from his point of view, he would be visiting them all at the same time from ours. Not 13′000 houses per second then, but 1.12 billion all at once! Easy!

3 – Distortion of Time by Mass. Ah yes, we’ve all heard of Black Holes and Event Horizons, right? The idea that a strong gravitational field can trap light, and muck up time and space; and that close to such a monster pretty weird stuff happens? The interesting thing is that it isn’t just about mass; it’s about density -how much mass is crammed into a particular volume of space. You can either have a huge amount of mass in a normal volume (the mass of the sun crushed to about the size of Central London (a sphere of radius 3km, if you really want the figure) would result in a black hole), or a small amount of mass in a tiny volume (a mountain range crushed to fit on a pinhead would probably create enough temporal anomalies to keep any physicist happy).

Now think about it: what do you think the total mass of all the presents in Santa’s sleigh is? Even if each weighed only 1g and each house had only 1 child and each child received only 1 present there would still be 1.12 billion grams packed onto the sleigh. Unfortunately this would not create a black hole, but it would create a pretty dense object that would distort spacetime around it. Again, I’m sure that with Santa’s resourcefulness he could use this phenomenon to supplement the other relativistic effects and “steal” some precious time from the universe.

And so, thanks to loopholes in existence (or just holes…), Santa’s miracle is explained away: getting to every house in the world in one night becomes not a thing of awe and wonder, but instead becomes nothing more than the application of tedious technical details!