'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Clement Moore's poem is a holiday tradition. With its careful and detailed description of Santa Claus and his eight tiny reindeer, and a more detailed description of Santa at work as he delivers presents, it is one of the best and most accurate accounts we have of the "right jolly old elf."
I mean, from a scientific point of view, what is better than observational data?
But, despite this excellent firsthand account, I get e-mails around this time every year proudly proclaiming Santa does not exist. I received one recently carefully outlining the scientific impossibility of Old Kris Kringle by pointing out reindeer can't fly, he would only have 1/3000th of a second to deliver presents at each house, and the g-forces involved in acceleration would flatten him like a pancake.
I mean, really!
Scientifically speaking, this defies logic as we have an account of Santa in the very act! If he didn't exist, well, who is the poem describing? What's the truth?
When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh with eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment that it must be St. Nick,
Well, I'd like to provide some science in favour of Santa Claus and it is this last couplet that provides the clue as to how the man in red can accomplish it all.
Quick isn't the word. Light speed would be a better term!
In the 1890s, Lorentz devised a set of equations called the Lorentz Transformations. The essential feature of these equations, for our purposes, is that time is intimately linked with velocity and totally relative. And we all know relatives are a big part of Christmas!
For anything with a velocity approaching the speed of light, time stretches. At the speed of light, time stops. That is, for anything traveling at the speed of light, time does not change or move or pass or... well, time is just meaningless.
This, of course, means if St. Nick is truly quick and traveling at the speed of light, then he has all of the time in the world to accomplish his task.
But, the skeptics cry, only photons can travel at the speed of light! And they are massless particles of energy.
True. The reason they need to be massless is also a consequence of the Lorentz
Transformations as anything with mass gets infinitely heavy as it approaches light speed.
If Santa is to travel at the speed of light, he must have no mass at all. That makes carrying presents somewhat problematic, to say the least! Not to mention the fact that he is invariably described as "chubby and plump" so he is already starting with a lot of mass!
Sub-atomic physics comes to the rescue, however.
You might have heard of the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. This has been dubbed The God Particle but that is a silly and misleading name. It really should be called The Santa Claus Particle.
After all, it is the interactions of the Higgs Boson with the universe which leads to "mass."
Shut down the Higgs Boson and you have a mass-less Santa Claus able to move at the speed of light. It is science that allows Santa to be light speed quick and have all the time he needs to visit every good boy and girl on Earth.
Of course, controlling the Higgs Boson requires a lot of energy - more than Santa Claus can get from just eating milk and cookies.
Where does the energy come from? Well, again sub-atomic physics allows for the production of large fluctuations in energy from the substance or vacuum of space itself, much like the Big Bang which produced the universe and all the mass in it in the first place. All of the Christmas presents, too! And since Christmas presents are observed to occur, one can only conclude the Big Bang must have taken place. Therefore, Santa must exist.
But in the end, what really matters, at this time of the year, is:
And I heard him exclaim, ere he flew out of sight,
Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.
