The Science of Christmas

Christmas is just around the corner, and if you’re anything like us, you’ll be struggling with the yearly questions that Christmas raises – how does Santa get round the world in just one night? How does Saint Nick make those reindeers fly? Can the elves really make enough presents for every child? Well, wonder no more! Here at Edulab, we don’t just provide laboratory equipment, we also seek out the answers to all your festive science questions! In this festive blog, we’ll take a look at one of the biggest Christmas questions.

How Does Santa Visit Every Child?

Let’s take the 2013 figures as a rough estimate. The population was somewhere around 7, 162, 119, 434 – 26% of the population were aged between 0-14. This gives us roughly 1.86 billion children in need of presents, and that’s a lot of presents! Now, let’s assume that some of these children live in the same house – we’ll take 2.5 children per household, this gives us 744 million houses that Santa must visit on Christmas Eve night! Even if half of those children are on the naughty list, Santa still has to visit 372 million homes, but for now, let’s assume that Santa’s feeling particularly generous and has overlooked naughty behaviour this year!

Now, if Santa were to travel from east to west and we assume that these children will be sleeping for 8 hours, that gives jolly old Saint Nick 32 hours to reach every home – that’s 115,200 seconds. That gives Santa 0.0001548387 seconds per house… without travel time. Now that is some speedy work.

So, it’s pretty safe to say that conventional methods of travel just aren’t going to cut it for Santa, but what could work? Some scientists have been hard at work coming up with theories that could explain how Santa manages his mammoth journey. Let’s take a look at two of these theories:

The Ion-Shield

If Santa is going to deliver all his presents in 32 hours, he’s going to need a pretty speedy sleigh, but to reach the speeds necessary, he would run the risk of burning up because of air resistance. Enter the ion-shield! This is just the gadget Santa will need to withstand the heat.

Time Travel

If time travel is possible, Santa should have no problem delivering all his presents by Christmas day morning. There are some scientists who believe that one day, time travel may be possible through wormholes, cosmic strings, or even super massive black holes – perhaps there is hope for Santa believers yet!

While the Santa theory looks unlikely, we don’t want to rule it out just yet! It’s best to be on the safe side, so if you’re wishing for science equipment this year, you may be better off contacting us directly rather than hoping for the Santa delivery! For more information about any of our products, please don’t hesitate to contact our team by calling 01366 385777.

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