K-STATE PHYSICIST DISCUSSES SANTA'S CHRISTMAS EVE TRAVELS

MANHATTAN -- How Santa accomplishes all his deliveries on Christmas Eve remains a mystery. Dean Zollman, professor of physics at Kansas State University, offers some possible explanations for how Santa does it all on Christmas Eve.

"Basically he has to travel rapidly," Zollman said. "And if he travels close to the speed of light, then there are some changes in the way time flows, and I think that gives him some extra time.

"However, he's starting and stopping a lot which makes the matter worse," he said. "Newton's Law states that everything else is going to keep moving if Santa stops his sleigh, so he has to have strong ropes to tie down all the presents or they're going to fly off."

Zollman said how reindeer fly on rooftops is another mystery of the Christmas holiday.

"The only way they're going to be able to stay on a steep roof is if they've got a lot of friction between the hooves and the roof," Zollman said. "I've never examined a reindeer's hooves, but I doubt they are made out of sticky stuff.

"Santa must put some kind of glue on the hooves to make them stick, but that allows them to break free when they need to," he said. "Flying is a little harder because reindeer aren't aerodynamically designed, and no matter how fast you would throw a reindeer, it still wouldn't stay in the air any longer than throwing a baseball at the same speed."

According to Zollman, because Santa eats so many cookies and is overweight, he should have a problem being able to slide down chimneys because the friction would be too great.

"The only way he could do it is if he sucked in his big stomach to slide down the chimney," Zollman said. "So we have to assume that he's got some really strong stomach muscles.

"As for going up the chimney, either he knows something about gravity that nobody else knows, or he's the world's best high jumper," he said. "Again, he must have really strong legs since we know that a good high jumper can't really make it up one story, and of course many chimneys are several stories high."

Zollman said those who are interested in learning more theories on science-related happenings at Christmas time may wish to read "The Physics of Christmas," written by Roger Highfield and published by Little-Brown, which focuses on a number of holiday events.

"One of the interesting things discussed in the book is the star of Bethlehem and what type of light was in the sky," Zollman said. "Could it have been a comet, or could it have been a set of planets coming close together?

"Of course there are some people who say it was just a miracle," he said. "The book also looks at holiday cooking , the thermodynamics of turkeys and how heat gets inside of them."

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For more information contact Dean Zollman at 785-532-1619.

December 1999