First of all I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!! To most people it's the time to give and for most children the time to receive some presents. Of course they wouldn't think that it's their parents that would put their presents under the Christmas tree. It would be none other than the wonderful Santa Claus which is also known as Saint Nicholas or Father Christmas.
However, when I went for dim sum a few weeks ago with some of my old schoolmates Wan Shin told me something quite interesting. Her friends tried to prove that Santa Claus does not exist through some scientific reasoning. For those of you who used to believe that Santa exists, and some of you who still do, here are some facts. enjoy. =)
1. There are no known species or reindeer that can fly. But since there are plenty of unknown organisms yet to be discovered, there would probably be flying reindeers. We just haven't discovered them yet. So one point for Santa and zero for Science.
2. There are about 2 billion children (under 18) in the world, and increasing. But since Santa doesn`t appear to handle Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total- 378 million or so. At an average rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. That's if there is at least one good child in every house.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with at maximum, thanks to time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west. 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 gifts under the tree, eat the snacks, get back up the chimney, get back in the sleigh, and move on to the next house. What a workout, but he's still described as 'overweight'?
4. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million homes are distributed evenly (which we know to be false but for the sake of these calculations we will accept) we are now talking about 1.3km per household, a total trip of 119.34 million km, not counting bathroom stops. How he can hold his bladder wei, if he has to eat the cookies and drink a glass of milk for every house he visits.
5. This means that Santa`s sleigh is traveling at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the space probe Helios 2 moves at a poky 67kmph; the average reindeer runs at 25kmph.
6. 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 one) could pull TEN TIMES the usual amount, we can not do the job with 8 or even 9 as we would normally see in pictures. We need about 214,000 reindeer. This increases the weight, not even counting the sleigh, to 353,430 tons.
7. A mass of 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer in the same manner as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. This is for you Physics people.
8. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the next pair of reindeer, and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. So much for giving presents to children quietly. The entire team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousands of a second. If that's the case, Santa would be totally burnt up even before he leaves the North Pole.
9. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times the force of gravity. A 300 pound Santa would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force. Again for you Physics people, you'll know what this means. =p
So that's why Santa Claus does not exist. But if you still believe that he exists, then he might be. At the same time I would also like to wish my friend Leow Li Ying a very Happy Birthday. It's been over a year since we've had a really nice conversation like what we used to. I know I've made some foolish mistakes in the past and yes I do regret them. But to me you'll always be a friend, a friend unlike any other who cannot be replaced by anyone. So, Happy Birthday. =)
The facts about Santa above are taken from here. =)
0 comments:
Post a Comment