The Science of Santa, With Arthur Christmas director Sarah Smith

Based on statistics I could find, I took the world?s population, estimated the percentage that celebrate Christmas, estimated the number of children under 12, then divided by an average number of children per household. That gave me a number of homes that had to be visited. I gave the North Pole 10 hours to complete the job, assuming they start at 6 pm on Christmas eve when darkness falls?those early deliveries are a challenge for the elves!?and give themselves a ?mission deadline? of 4 am, so all is ready for those early risers.

I made a simple division: Half of that time was flying time, and half delivery. I worked on various sizes of elf army, and arrived at just under 1 million elves working in teams of three. If I gave 330,000 elf teams 5 hours (18,000 seconds) to deliver to the calculated number of households, I ended up with just over 18.14 seconds per team per household to make each ?drop.? Of course, if the mission gets held up anywhere, as in the movie, the drop time has to be revised and the elves have to go even faster.

The other 5 hours are flying time. We had to assume the S-1 can travel exponentially faster than any other craft that exists in the world at present. I took my lead from the physicists [helping us]?as long as we are talking multiples of the speed of sound, science will allow this to be theoretically achievable. If we had to posit that the S-1 traveled faster than the speed of light, we would be in a sci-fi world that is not considered possible. The times and distances are extremely hard to calculate, but just doing ballpark estimates, we weren?t in the realm of the speed of light. So I let myself off with the general idea that it was possible.

I also calculated figures for the old sleigh. If it had ever done the job, it too had to be able to go incredibly fast. I reckoned on it being able to go approximately twice round the world in an hour?I worked on a maximum speed of around 45,000 mph. I varied the speed according to whether the sleigh was empty or had passengers, and since in our story some of the reindeer get lost from the sleigh, I also calculated speeds according to what percentage of its team of reindeer were pulling it. Then we calculated the distances between every point on the globe visited by the sleigh?we found the latitude and longitude for every location and referred to a website which gave us distances between these.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/fact-vs-fiction/the-science-of-santa-with-arthur-christmas-director-sarah-smith?src=rss

meteor shower tonight district 9 district 9 pandaria pandaria artie lange baby lisa irwin