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