Once again, we are at that time of year where I feel the need to provide readers with a seasonally appropriate article. I did an article on the Chemical Engineering of Christmas a few years ago (to summarise – in case you missed that one – I basically argue that without chemical engineering, all of your presents every year would be sticks and pebbles, wrapped in a kale leaf if you are lucky; and that whilst there are many deep green types who would like us to go back to that state of affairs as soon as possible, we are unfortunately stuck with plastic, electricity, refined metals, clean water, effective medicine and so on for the foreseeable future). I considered doing a follow-on article to the scientific proof of the non-existence of Santa which was set out many years ago in New Scientist magazine, and abridged in my last Christmas article thus:
“353,000 tons (the estimated weight of Santa, sleigh and 214,200 magic flying reindeer) traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance — this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame 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. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to forces 17,500.06 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. In conclusion: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.”
However, a quick look at the internet showed me that various academic sciencey types had got there before me, calculating for example how many carrots’-worth of energy each of those 214,200 magic reindeer would need to consume to play their part in accelerating 353,000 tonnes of stuff to 650 miles per second and decelerate it back to a stop several thousand times a second (it’s a lot!).
At the risk of turning this article into some sort of Science-of-Christmas meta-analysis, I can report that several of these follow-up articles also gave revised estimates for just how fast Santa would need to go to get the job done in the available time. These estimates are consistently far higher than the New Scientist’s, adding up to significant fractions of the speed of light. These speeds would however give Santa a bit of a theory-of-relativity-based improvement on his travel time, since time would pass more slowly for a close-to-light-speed Santa than a stationary one. No-one however thought he would need to achieve faster than light “warp speed”, although Star Trek style inertial dampeners would certainly come in handy at these levels of acceleration and deceleration if Santa is not to be reduced to a smear on his sleigh.
Naturally, one academic thought that Santa’s instant death – due to the enormous temperatures and pressures- could be avoided by giving him (and presumably also the magic reindeer) suits made of graphene. Academics are so used to promising us that graphene is basically mithril – only stronger, lighter, cheaper and far more versatile – that this apparently seemed reasonable to them. (Side note: I am sufficiently old and nerdy that I initially thought “mithril” would need no explanation. However, to quote EB White, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind”. So, to explain, (and thereby kill the joke), mithril is a magical material which appears in the Hobbit/Lord of The Rings (and computer games like “Baldur’s Gate”, because Tolkien failed to copyright it).
A key point seemingly missed by those other nerds is that both Santa and the reindeer were always supposed to be magical: more magical than graphene, inertial dampers, warp drives and so on. Either you believe in magic or you don’t. If you do, then Santa always was and always will be real. Any apparent practical problems associated with that statement can be solved at a stroke by the single word “magic”.
Similarly, one might argue that graphene, AI, blockchain, Industry 4.0 and so on will all magically overcome their technical challenges, and solve all of our problems. You just need to believe! It also helps to believe that further research is always needed, so that academia will be given unlimited funds to continue weaving its magic. I was once told that academia is a gift economy; to put it another way, every day is Christmas for academics, and they would like us all to be their secret Santa!
