The Science Of Santa
By: Will Lockett
Tags: Space, Christmas, Physics, Technology, Science

The Science Of Santa

Every year over the night of Chrismas Eve, one jolly man manages to get around the entire world and deliver over 200 million presents. A feat which puts Amazon to shame. In fact, this monumental task seems so huge that some people question whether St Nick really exists. But he does, and it is 100% possible. So how does Santa do it? And could Bezos learn a thing or two from the man in red?

You may think that Santa needs to go at some impossible speed to make his round and you’d be right. But actually, it isn’t impossible, it’s just very, very fast.

There are around 75 million homes worldwide with children in, each with an average of 2.7 children. The average distance between these houses is 1.63 miles which means over 24 hours, Santa covers 122 million miles. A simple bit of maths shows that he must be going at an average speed of five million miles an hour, or about 0.7% the speed of light.

75 million homes with children — Pixabay

So, it is possible to get to all the houses in one night without breaking any physics. It’s just orders of magnitude faster than anyone else has ever gone. Santa’s elves are far better engineers than us and are decades ahead, so this makes sense.

But Santa has to stop and deliver presents; he isn’t just on a midnight drive-by. As Santa is a pro, it probably only takes him a handful of seconds to drop off each present, lets say ten seconds. Multiply that up, he spends 8,680 days delivering presents, or 23 years.

So it’s possible to get around all the houses in one night, but he can’t stop. This is a dilma! Santa needs more time! But luckily for him, he has the tech that can literally give him more time.

Santa has a magnificent bit of tech called The Slab. It’s a blend of Exotic Matter and Neutron star material that is so dense and heavy that it actually slows down time around it. So as long as he takes this lump of extremely dense stuff with him, he could take his time to deliver presents at each household.

How does this ‘Slab’ work? Well, it uses relativity and gravitational time dilation. Let me explain.

Santa needs to slow down time so that 8,681 days to him (travel time of one day and delivery time of 8,680 days) looks like one day to us. So, for every one second we experience, Santa needs to experiences 2.4 hours. That is a lot of time dilation to happen in a tiny bubble. To achieve this you need something incredibly dense and small, that is where The Slab comes in.

The Slab is around 4m³ and sits under Santa’s seat; it has the mass equivalent of 1.279x1⁰²⁵ kg, making it about 15 billion times denser than a typical Black Hole! This colossal mass provides enough gravity to slow down time by relativistic effects. This is known as Gravitational Time Dilation, which basically means that the more gravity you are under, the slower time passes.

But, something this dense would turn into a Black Hole! And just getting particles this close would be impossible! Luckily, Santa has Exotic Matter, something which our scientists have yet to discover.

Santa’s Exotic Matter has opposite gravity, it pushes rather than pulls, but it also reduces the electromagnetic forces in nearby particles. These two properties of his Exotic Matter allows him to have the densest object in the Universe. The blend of Neutron star material and Exotic Matter is balanced. It is gravitationally neutral; this stops it turning into a Black Hole or crushing Santa under his own weight. The reduction in the strength of the electromagnetic field for nearby particles means the ‘Slab’ can be ultra-dense without the need to be squashed by gravity.

Now you may wonder, how can a gravitationally neutral object create gravitational time dilation? It is all to do with Santas Exotic Matter. Our scientists haven’t been able to get their hands on this stuff yet, but it counteracts gravity's pull without changing the distortion in spacetime, which creates time dilation.

2D gravity well — Pixabay

We have all seen the picture of gravity as a sloping surface that we ‘fall’ into. However, Exotic Matter pushes us gently back uphill rather than flattening the hill. We are still down the slope, but the ‘flow’ of the Exotic Matter means we can’t feel it’s pull. Just like one of those wave machines you get on cruises. So in short, you don’t feel the force of gravity, but you do feel its’ relativistic effects as you are still in the gravity well.

Flow Rider — WikiCC

This is why Santa doesn’t use his Exotic Matter to make Wormholes or Alcubier Drives; these require spacetime to be bent in the opposite direction to gravity. Santa’s Exotic Matter only pushes you out of the depressions in spacetime (like the Flow Rider being pushed by the water up the wave wall) it doesn’t change the shape of spacetime.

All of this means that if you stood next to The Slab, a second would be stretched out to 2.4 hours. This gives Santa his precious time to deliver his presents.

But, we run into another problem. The gravity of this object has gone, but its’ inertia is still there. Inertia is an objects’ want to stay at the same velocity, the more mass something has, the more inertia it has, the more difficult it is to change its’ velocity. Santa’s sleigh needs to get up to some very high velocities, so we don’t want this huge inertia! But, to move The Slab is like trying to move something the mass of Saturn, to get all the mass moving will take an unbelievable amount of force!

The Sled would have similar inertia as Saturn with The Slab onboard- WikiCC

This is where the Higgs Field Suppressor comes into play. It makes all the particles in a radius of several metres interact with the Higgs Field a lot less. The Higgs Feild is a soup of massless particles that are everywhere in the Universe. They interact with particles and give them their mass and inertia (different to gravity). If you could reduce a particle's interaction with the Higgs Field, you wouldn’t reduce its mass (its gravitation pull would be the same), but it would reduce its inertia. That is what the Higgs Feild Suppressor does.

Santas Higgs Feild Suppressor looks something like this — Pixabay

This little devices creates a bubble a few metres wide of reduced Higgs Feild around the sleigh. So rather than having a large planet's inertia, the sleigh only has the inertia equivalent to a few grams!

This has an added bonus. The reduced inertia of the air around the sleigh reduces air friction. As the air weighs virtually nothing, it moves out of the way a lot easier. This allows the sleigh to travel at the 0.7% speed of light it needs, without a huge power source! So if the sleigh had a powerful enough rocket it could move through our atmosphere and achieve these speeds.

So, how does Santa do it? He uses a blend of his own Exotic Matter and Neutron Star Matter to slow down time to give him the extra time he needs to make his deliveries. Then he uses a Higgs Field Suppressor and a rocket-powered sledge to get him, The Slab and all the presents around the world in 24 hours. He does it with science, not magic!

I wonder if Bezos has tried to buy Santas tech yet? Imagine what he could do with The Slab and the Higgs Field Suppressor?!