What would Santa need to deliver gifts to millions of children in one night? Laser sensors on his sleigh and jetpack-equipped reindeer, according to studies on Christmas icons and traditions.

Beneath the festive exterior of the season lies a scientific side of the holidays. Physicists, scientists, engineers and other experts have examined the neuroscience in gift giving, the physics behind Santa’s sleigh, the feasibility of his Christmas Eve mission and astronomical theory of the Star of Bethlehem.

Presents on the Mind
The process of shopping for gifts might seem tedious, yet the act of giving is tied to social science. In a study published in the journal Science, researchers examined the physiological effects behind giving and stressed that the more people give, the happier they are. Additionally, based on the researchers’ prosocial experiment, they found that those who spend on others are happier than those who spend on themselves.

The study cites a specific case of people donating to a local food bank. The act of giving led to a physical reaction in the brain, activating the ventral striatum, “a brain region associated with representing the value of a range of rewarding stimuli, from cocaine to art to attractive faces.” Perhaps gift-giving grinches should keep this lesson in mind as we inch closer the holidays: gift giving can be for the greater good.

For more on this, see Stanford Graduate School of Business’ Spending on Happiness.

Santa Science
With so many gifts and such an extensive global journey, the Engineering Education Service Center jokes that, realistically, the high speed of Santa’s sleigh paired with the load of presents for children around the world would lead to some rather dangerous consequences, such as an instantaneous burst of flames. But before such a technical conclusion extinguishes the holiday spirit, other experts have examined how Santa could conceivably accomplish his goal.

“If Santa Claus is to deliver all the gifts to all the good children, his sleigh must fly so fast that he would burn up due to air resistance. But it has already been documented that Santa has no problem climbing down a chimney with a fire burning below,” astrophysicist Knut Jørgen Røed Oedegaard explains to PhysOrg.com. “Santa obviously has an ion-shield of charged particles, held together by a magnetic field, surrounding his entire sleigh. This is how he solves the heat problem.”

For more on this, see PhysOrg’s The Physics of Santa Claus.

Sleigh Science
How would Santa’s sleigh endure such a globe-spanning journey without falling apart? According to Dr. Larry Silverberg, a researcher at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and an expert in unified field theory, Santa’s technology is ahead of all other aircraft. “The truss of the sleigh, including the runners, are made of a honeycombed titanium alloy that is very lightweight and 10 to 20 times stronger than anything we’ve ever seen in the lab,” NCSU’s The Abstract explains. Such a truss would shape-shift to navigate through the air.

Moreover, the sleigh’s nanostructured “skin” must be porous and contain its own low-pressure system, which holds the air flowing around the airborne sled onto the body, reducing drag by as much as 90 percent. Finally, the sleigh, powered by jetpack-equipped reindeer, would navigate with the help of laser sensors that would be able to detect “upcoming thermals and wind conditions to find the optimal path.”

For more on this, see The Abstract’s Dispatches From The North Pole: The Science of Santa’s Sleigh.

Delivery Magic
To save time when delivering gifts, Kris Kringle would travel in about 11 dimensions rather than our usual four dimensions (time being the fourth dimension). “These dimensions make it quite easy to pick up gifts from his warehouse at the North Pole,” according to Oedegaard. “The more dimensions, the easier to deliver gifts.”

Santa’s staff might also require some advanced efficiency techniques to get their jobs done. Silverberg suggests that elves could produce toys on the spot (in case Santa forgot to check his list twice) using the magic sack — “a sort of nano-toymaker that uses a reversible thermodynamic processor to create toys for good girls and boys on site,” Silverberg explains. “As you can imagine, that cuts down significantly on the overall weight of the sleigh (fuel efficiency!). The magic sack uses carbon-based soot from chimneys, together with other local materials, to make the toys by applying high-precision electromagnetic fields to reverse thermodynamic processes previously thought to be irreversible.”

For more on this, see The Abstract’s Dispatches From The North Pole: Santa’s Bag Of Toys.

The Christmas Star
In Biblical terms, the Star of Bethlehem — aka the Christmas Star — represents a miracle that helped guide the Three Wise Men. In the scientific field, the star has been examined as an unusual astrological event. Mathematical physicist and cosmologist Frank Jennings Tipler has argued that the Star of Bethlehem was, most probably, a supernova in the Andromeda galaxy. Essentially, this would mean that the guiding light was a result of a star collapse or explosion.

However, other experts say it could have been a planetary conjunction. They explain that the holy star could have been the result of planets passing close to one another, giving the illusion of a large light to those viewing the phenomenon from Earth, as Machine Design notes. Such a conjunction occurred in 8 B.C., with Mars and the Sun, and again in 6 B.C. with the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. While historians seem divided on the exact date of Jesus’ birth, these astrological events may provide the scientific evidence behind the Scripture.

For more on this, see Machine Design’s The Science of the Star of Bethlehem.

Resources

Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness
by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin and Michael I. Norton
Science, March 2008

Spending on Happiness
Stanford Graduate School of Business Center for Social Innovation

Santa Claus: An Engineer’s Perspective
Engineering Education Service Center

The Physics of Santa Claus
PhysOrg.com, Dec. 23, 2004

Dispatches From The North Pole: The Science of Santa’s Sleigh
by Matt Shipman
The Abstract (North Carolina State University), Dec. 6, 2010

Dispatches from the North Pole: Santa’s Bag Of Toys
by Matt Shipman
The Abstract (North Carolina State University), Dec. 20, 2010

The Star of Bethlehem: a Type Ia/Ic Supernova in the Andromeda Galaxy
by F. J. Tipler
The Observatory, June 2005

The Science of the Star of Bethlehem
by Julie Kalista
Machine Design, Dec. 13, 2007