THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
207-780-4249 www.usm.maine.edu/planet
70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103
43.6667° N 70.2667° W
Founded January 1970
Julian date: 2457733.16
"Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal
longings in me."
-William Shakespeare
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Santa's Relativity
I realize that these articles are no places for personal reflections, but
today I feel compelled to confess: Once upon a time I attempted to injure
Santa Claus. I didn't, of course, and am not sorry for my failure. In
retrospect, I do regret the attempt, for it has weighed with me like an
acorn on a neutron star and I hope this testimonial will alleviate my
woeful burden.
You see, like so many younger people, I had made earnest, but ultimately
vain, efforts to glimpse Santa as he stuffed my stocking. I would lie
on the couch in front of the fireplace and await St Nick's arrival after,
of course, I had left the conventional plate of cookies and a cup of cocoa.
(Except for the year when my midwestern Uncle visited for Christmas and,
on his advice, left only Budweiser and Bears tickets.) Alas, each
year I drifted off by 8 o'clock and was mired in sleep's timeless oblivion
when that north pole interloper arrived with the loot. I awoke early the
next morning to excitedly behold the bulges in the felt stocking.
However, the regret at having once again missed Santa Claus slightly
diminished the unbounded joy that Christmas morning avarice generally
engenders in children.
One Christmas I finally formulated a "clever" plan. It came to me on
Christmas Eve day when, during my desperate search for hidden presents, I
spied some mousetraps under the kitchen sink, And, yes you can guess
what happened next. I set one of the mousetraps and gently placed it in a
stocking. (My brother's stocking. ha ha!) I realized that when Santa
appeared, he would be in such haste that he wouldn't even look into the
stocking prior to filling it and then, snap! His hand would touch the
trap, the coil would release the bar onto his middle and index. His yelp
would awaken me and while he was writhing around on the living room floor
in ecstasy, I would rush over for a big hug and then to get a Polaroid snap
so as to have something to show all the smart kids in my class who smugly
asserted the Santa didn't exist.
I am alive today because I had the wherewithal to inform my parents of my
plan just as I had hopped up on the couch that Christmas Eve. "Hey, Mom,
guess what. I'm going to see Santa this year because, guess what, I put
a....." and so forth... I was bitterly disappointed when I was sent to
bed twenty minutes later in a straitjacket.
As it turns out, I needn't have bothered to make a trap for Santa, for we
all now know how he travels. That issue caused such consternation among
physicists and engineers through the ages. They realized that Santa had
to move quickly to deliver presents to the hundreds of millions of homes
where Christmas is observed. It is true that his sleigh is guided by
reindeer (known as "caribou" in northern New England.) Yet, in order to
carry all the presents, which would require a sleigh with a volume equal to
100 football stadia, Santa would need about 252,000 reindeer. Even if he
could find all these reindeer and, of course, give them cute names like
"vixen," these reindeer would have to move so quickly that the frictional
heating through the air would incinerate them within less than a second,
causing Santa's oversized sleigh to crash to the ground with a
civilization-ending bang.
Moreover, there was that matter of Santa's conventional conduit: the
chimney. While some houses were equipped with large, medieval chimneys
designed to increase heating bills 300%, many were much smaller. Some were
so small, they were more like pipes than chimneys. A fellow with
Santa's prodigious girth would be hard pressed to ease down the flue in
some of these destinations. Based on these objections, some sour-souled
engineers concluded that Santa was merely a figment of our imaginations.
Well, bah humbug, you fools!
The solution is really quite simple. Santa travels at light speed and
moves on his own. He only uses the reindeer en route to shopping malls
or Times Square. and these are only for effect because, as any northerner
can attest, reindeer are not exactly jaguars when it comes to speed.
Moving at light speed solves the efficiency problem, as it is the maximum
attainable velocity and one can cover a lot of houses when zipping along at
186,00 miles per second. Also, one must consider the relativistic effects.
Time dilates aboard any moving vessel. Time stops completely on any
ship traveling at light speed. So, Santa hops from house to house in, by
his perspective, no time at all!
Another relativistic effect is length contraction. See the graphic
below. It shows how a vessel's length literally contracts with motion.
The faster the vessel travels, the shorter it becomes. If the vessel
moves at light speed, its length contracts to a singularity: a mathematical
point of no dimension. If plump ol' Santa becomes a singularity, he
can fit down any chimney.
*Length contraction as a function of speed. Here, "c" equals the speed
of light.*
*One notices how a vessel's length contracts as its speed approaches light
speed.*
*Image by Boundless.com*
Being a singularity also solves that frictional heating problem because by
being a point of no dimension, Santa would have no surface that would
experience this heating. Now, Santa would also become infinitely
massive, because mass does increase with increasing speed and, at light
speed, Santa would become infinitely massive. Most roofs, even those in
high snow regions, aren't designed to withstand any infinitely massive
objects. Santa no doubt counteracts this effect with a special kind
of ancient Nordic sorcery of which we mortals can have no knowledge..
And, well, this proof of Santa's existence should put the kibosh on that
teeming throng of toffee-nosed naysayers who seem to have lost touch with
reality. And, I, for one, am glad that the burning guilt that has for so
long combusted in my thorax might finally extinguished. I needn't have
felt guilty at all, as it turns out. As Einstein would have told me:
mousetraps can't injure singularities.
© 2016 Edward Gleason