The Physics of Santa Claus

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children; that reduces the workload to 15% of the total, or 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the Earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. That 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 presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the Earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting the stops most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, i.e. toilet stops, feeding etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle ever made; the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run, at tops, 15 miles per hour). No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and bacteria, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer (which only Santa has ever seen).

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. 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 assuming that "flying reindeer" could pull ten times the normal amount, the job could not be performed with eight, or even nine. He would need 214,200 of them. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison, this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the boat that is; not the monarch).

353,000+ tons travelling at 650 miles per second generates enormous air resistance; this will heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy each per second. In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or round about the time Santa finished delivering presents to the fourth house. Not that it would really matter, as Santa, meanwhile, would be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his organs and reducing his body to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore if Santa actually did exist, he's dead now.