The Physics of Santa

With Christmas right around the corner, I’ve decided to take a closer look at the physics of Santa as he travels to households across the world. The first thing I looked at is how fast Santa would need to go in order to deliver a present to every christian household with at least one good child. This can be determined if we say that Santa must travel 510,000,000km on Christmas Eve in 32 hours. That means that Santa would be traveling 1.6 x 10^5km/hr. This velocity is obviously impossible since we don't even have any mode of transportation that can travel that fast. Thus, making it impossible for Santa to deliver all the presents.

There are other factors that should be taken into account when looking at Santa’s travels during Christmas Eve. For example, the weight of the sled would be enormous because of all the toys that would need to be on the sled and a large number of reindeers would be needed in order to carry this massive amount of toys. Furthermore, since we are traveling in the x-direction we need to take into account that there would be a force of air resistance acting on Santa, the sled, and all the reindeer. This would need to be taken into account to find the force needed to move in the x direction. When we think about these factors, it makes the possibility of Santa being real impossible and that is why I looked into the physics of Santa.