With exams just around the corner, it’s only natural for your mind to wander to anything but what you should actually be studying. And what better distraction than everyone’s favourite diabetic Santa Claus? As the academics we are, the plausibility of Santa’s Christmas Eve exploits inevitably come into question. Even though he’s clearly a magical being from the North Pole, let’s imagine how Santa would do all these things if he had no magic and had to rely on physics alone.
Let’s start with the obvious first issue: Santa lives at the North Pole. Full-time. The same place where the average winter temperature is minus 40 degree Celsius and your eyelashes can stick together from cold. While this may sound a bit like the Boland Library, Santa can’t survive these extremes by wearing a thrifted leather jacket and skinny scarf. Instead his survival may be a combination of insulation and infrastructure. Penguins don’t live in the North Pole (a fact children should be informed of gently), so Santa gets the entire Arctic to himself. With no neighbours, no Dublin rent, and no planning permission to stop him, Santa can build whatever he wants beneath the ice. The “toy workshop” we all picture is probably just the visitor centre, while the actual workshop is an underground complex on par with European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), powered by geothermal heat and lit with the brightest, most energy-efficient lights known to elf-kind.
So who are the brainboxes behind this underground workshop? Perhaps the elves are more than Germanic folklore but rather hyper-specialised robots, wearing a green get-up and stripy tights to cover up their metal bodies. These tiny craftsmen can hack into any system, overriding General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations to get the name of every child, then creating an algorithm to determine who meets the metrics of “naughty” and “nice”. Maybe take a peak under the hat of your elf on the shelf, who knows what you’ll find.
Now that Santa and his elves are comfortably established in his cosy Arctic bunker complex, we can move to the big question: how does he travel around the world in one night? Even with every time zone, every winter solstice, and the complete rotation of the Earth as a helping hand, he still has to visit hundreds of millions of homes. Even if his sleigh could outpace Max Verstappen, something weird is going on.
This is where we turn to quantum mechanics to lend a helping hand. Quantum mechanics allows objects to be in many places at once, through a principle called superposition. If Santa can put himself into a state of superposition, he too can simultaneously exist in multiple places. Instead of physically moving from house to house in a linear way, Santa simply spreads himself into a vast cloud of Santas, each one popping into a different living room. This could also explain why no one hears him land on the roof as there is no landing. There is just a probabilistic Santa distribution that temporarily collapses into your house the moment milk and cookies are detected. If this is true then Santa is not just a hero to children, but to all experimental physicists.
Of course, using superposition all night must be exhausting, so relativity plays its part too. In a nutshell, relativity describes how the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time passes for you relative to everyone else. So when Santa is travelling between houses, he likely speeds up just enough for time to stretch in his favour. He doesn’t even need to turn himself into a human photon, but a small relativistic tweak gives him extra subjective hours to work with. From our perspective, he’s a blur crossing the sky. But from Santa’s perspective, he has enough time to double-check the Nice List, adjust his hat, and even have a quick pint at the Pav.
Now that we know how Santa gets from home to home, the next issue is how Santa slides down chimneys that struggled to fit a Victorian child. The most plausible mechanism is quantum tunnelling. This is a quantum mechanical phenomenon where a particle can pass through a potential energy barrier even though it doesn’t have enough energy to overcome it classically. At a quantum scale particles exist as fuzzy probability waves that can blur into places they’re not “supposed” to reach, seeping past a barrier like it momentarily ignored the rules. It hasn’t smashed through or climbed over since the barrier never fully “stopped” it in the first place. Translate this principle to Santa and he doesn’t need to worry about chimneys at all.
But what about houses without chimneys? Here Santa shows true 21st century innovation. Obviously he harnesses everyone’s obsession with smart home technology and syncs himself with the world’s WiFi. This can tell Santa’s onboard navigation system exactly where your living room is, like an actually accurate eircode. He doesn’t even need a key because your house broadcasts the magical equivalent of a QR code every Christmas Eve. Santa just follows the signal and makes a “floo powder”-like entrance.
Gift delivery is another issue in need of a physics solution. Even if Santa is hiding a six pack under that red suit, a bag full of presents that obey normal spatial rules would weigh thousands of tonnes. Unless Santa is a secret body-builder, the only explanation is that the sack must be bigger on the inside, like a quantum storage system. Each gift only pops into normal space when Santa reaches the correct coordinates, like clicking “unzip file”. If only they could translate this concept to my bag of groceries.
So, when you’re left at the kids table with a thrumming headache after 12 Pubs, you can just tell your over-excited cousins that Santa is indeed real and is a leader in the fields of relativity, quantum mechanics, and cookie consumption. However, if they wake up with coal in their stocking, I’m leaving that explanation to you.
