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Science and Shenanigans. Heart and Hope. Followed by THOUSANDS of Scientists who chat on @sciencepawdcast Tweets by @Zedscience

Dec 24, 2021, 7 tweets

Ok. It’s time for Santa Science.
Hold on to your beard and hat.
🧵 (1/7)

Santa has to visit around 600 million kids in 24 hours (32ish due to timezones) but anyway. To get to this many houses Santa travels SO fast he experiences TIME DILATION.
Santa moves SO fast time slows for him. (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity) (2/7)

So BOOM due to slowed time, he can get to all those houses! On top of this, he would age slower AND shrink in size due to time contraction. The size of an object shrinks the faster it goes. Guess which jolly man can now fit down a chimney? (3/7)

How fast would Santa need to go? The number we got is 10.7 million km/ hour. Is that possible?
Light travels at 300 000 km per second. So Santa only needs to travel 1% the speed of light and as we said above he’s going far faster. (4/7)

Can the sleigh hold all the presents. Ok good question. This is where we may need some advanced physics. Using the 600 million kids and an average present mass of 2-6kg that would make his sleigh weigh at least 1.2 billion kg. Can the reindeer pull the sleigh??? (5/7)

Let’s just take a second to agree that the reindeer can fly AND the sled is moving more than 1% the speed of light. Also that one of the deer has a luminescent nose.
It’s totally plausible the reindeer manipulate dark energy to avoid the laws of gravity. (6/7)

Dark Energy is pushing galaxies away from each other with physics that confound the laws of gravity. Flying reindeer can be explained with the ability to harness this undetectable force.
So Santa just uses Science!

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