As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research
help from that renowned scientific journal SPY Magazine, I am
pleased to present this scientific inquiry into the existence of
Santa Claus.
     
     1) No known species of reindeer can fly, but there are 300,000
species of organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these
are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying
reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
     
     2) There are 2 billion children (defined as persons under 18) in the
world; However, since Santa doesn't appear to handle Muslim, Hindu,
Jewish, or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload down to 15%
of the original total - 378 million according to the Population
Reference Bureau. At an average census rate of 3.5 children per
household, that's only 91.8 million homes. One presumes that there
is at least one good child in each.
     
     3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the
different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he
travels east to west. This works out to 822.6 visits per second.
That is to say that for each Christian household with good children,
Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump
down the chiminey, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining
presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get
back up the chiminey, get back into the sleigh, and move on to the
next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are
evenly distributed around the earth (which we know to be false but
will accept for the purpose of these calculations), we are talking
about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles,
not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every
31 hours, plus eating, etc.
     
     This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second,
3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the
fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky
27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run 15 miles per
hour at the most.
     
     4) The payload on the sleigh add another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-size set of
Lego building blocks (about two pounds), the sleigh is carrying
321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as
verweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300
pounds. Even granting that flying reindeer exist (see point 1), can
fly very quickly (see point 2), and can pull ten times the normal
amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine, reindeer. We
would need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for
comparision, this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2.
     
     
     5) 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous
air resistance. This would heat the reindeer up in the same fashion
as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of
reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second.
Each. In short, they would burst into flame almost instantaneously,
exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening sonic
booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized
within .00426 seconds. Santa, meanwhile, would be subjected to
forces 17,500 times greater than normal gravity. A 250-pound Santa
(which seems slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by
4,315,015 pounds of force.
     
In conclusion, if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

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