With the arrival of Christmas comes a most pleasant visitor; Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever name you choose to give him, he only works one night a year but boy does he deliver.
In addition, how do we express our gratitude to him? We deny that he exists! Use phrases like “holiday folk tale” or “physically impossible given the rules of physics” to describe him! We at, on the other hand, have had enough of this disdain. Santa Claus is real, and we have proof. Here are five scientific and philosophical reasons that demonstrate that Santa Claus is indeed coming to town.
Let us explain: assertion 1 is either true or untrue. If it is true, then the rest of the list is false, thus, assertion 1 is also wrong. However, this is a contradiction because we started with the assumption that statement 1 is correct. This is obviously nonsense: a proposition cannot be both true and untrue. The only other possibility is if assertion 1 is false.
However, if statement 1 is false, it suggests that at least one of the statements in the list is correct. Because we know that assertion 1 is untrue, the only possibility is that statement 2 is true: Santa Claus exists, without a doubt. (While this proof is apparently foolproof, the more observant among you might want to seek up the “Liar Paradox” to learn why other arguments identical to this one aren’t as persuasive as they appear at first — the first assertion is self-referential.)
In her 2017 book The Undeniable Existence of Santa Claus, mathematician Hannah Fry writes, “Mathematically speaking, all of this is a bit bad.” “Self-referential assertions like this don’t have to be true or incorrect, hence the contradiction is resolved.”
The liar dilemma is not simply a clever approach to disprove Santa’s detractors; it also has some fascinating philosophical implications. In the 1930s, logician Alfred Tarski endeavored to discover an “adequate” – often understated mathematician-speak meaning “irrefutable” – definition of “truth” using some highly obscure mathematics.
Instead, he unwittingly established what now known as “Tarski’s theorem on the undefinability of truth” because of the liar paradox, which is exactly what he did not intend to happen.
Quantum physics is the study of quantum phenomena. Despite all of these irrefutable data, some scientifically uneducated persons continue to deny Santa’s reality. On the surface, one of the most prevalent justifications provided for this defection seems reasonable: how could someone delivers all those gifts in one night without being heard.
These skeptics had no idea that science has known the explanation to Santa’s seemingly superhuman courier abilities for a long time — it is simply quantum physics. Let me explain: we already know a lot about how Santa would need to travel on Christmas Eve in order to deliver all of the gifts to all of the children who await them.
Assuming he has the good wisdom to go east to West, we know not only his direction but also his speed: eight hours of nighttime divided by 24 time zones equals 31 hours. We can estimate the number of youngsters he needs to reach based on census data: roughly 850 million.
This gives Santa a minimum speed of about 300,000 kilometers per second, according to science writer Roger Highfield, which is quite fast. In fact, it’s incredibly fast: at speeds of more than 6,000 times the sound, Santa will be hit by a force 17,500 times stronger than gravity in his sled, and for Rudolph – well, at that speed, friction from the atmosphere is one second of Santa’s loyal friends. It will evaporate in less than two hundred parts, taking out more than 214,000 deer before the end of the night.
That does not seem that cheerful, does it? Fortunately, the statistics contradict the facts on record, indicating that classical mechanics is not the solution. However, thanks to quantum mechanics, everything makes sense. “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum physics says that if we know one variable well, we can’t know the other one accurately,” high-energy scientist Daniel Tapia Takaki told the BBC. “We know what Santa’s speed will be, but we don’t know where he’ll be.”
Visiting every home in one night “may be doable” thanks to quantum physics’ inherent inevitable strangeness, according to Tapia Takaki – it simply requires Santa to be “a superposition of quantum states, in other words, a collection of Santas scattered all over the earth.”
It makes a lot more sense why we have never seen Santa in person given that we know he follows quantum principles rather than physical ones. The uncertainty principle would no longer apply if a youngster occurred to see him on his quest, according to Tapia Takaki. “If you knew his specific location,” he added, “the quantum state would collapse, and no further presents could be distributed.”
