What if someone told you the fastest man on Earth was not Olympic gold medallist Usain Bolt, but an obese elderly man with a full white beard who has a thing for red velvet suits?
In fact, Bolt would have to run 200,000 times faster than he does now just to catch up with him.
So who is this mystery man? He’s holly, he’s jolly; he’s Santa Claus.
That’s right, Santa himself holds the title of the planet’s fastest (not to be mistaken for fattest) man, which would make sense since he has to deliver all those presents in a short amount of time.
READ MORE: How to tell your kids the truth about Santa Claus
But surely it cannot be possible for anyone – let alone an aging man on the brink of diabetes – to deliver gifts to all 700 million children who celebrate Christmas around the world in one night, right?
Oh, but it is, and physicist Katy Sheen at the University of Exeter uses Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to help explain how that could be possible.
The theory, she says, doesn’t only explain his speed, but why the man appears to not have aged throughout the years.
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According to Sheen in her article (which she wrote in her spare time), Santa and his reindeer would have to travel at about 10 million km/h to deliver presents to every kid in a 31-hour period (taking into account world time zones).
And as the population grows Santa will need to up his speed even more. When he does, he’ll go so fast that he’ll turn into a rainbow-coloured blur, eventually disappearing altogether from the human eye. This is thanks to the Doppler effect (you can find more on that here) because the light waves he would release would get squished at such a high speed.
“Some strange things happen when you start to travel that fast,” Sheen told The Telegraph. “Firstly, time slows down. Second, Santa gets squished which means that he can fit down a chimney more easily.”
The Doppler effect would also explain why kids can’t hear Santa when he arrives at the house. If anything, the sound of his sleigh bells and his “ho ho ho-ing” would get higher and higher and then become completely silent and inaudible to the human ear.
READ MORE: Santa admits there’s a record number of kids on the ‘nice’ list this year
And if anyone is lucky enough to hear a bang on Christmas night, that’s Santa breaking the sound barrier and causing a sonic boom – not an old man’s hefty footsteps on your rooftop.
But for a man who was born around 280 A.D., Santa doesn’t look a day over 1,143 years old. How does he do it? Is it magic or good genes? Or maybe he’s just born with it (maybe it’s Maybelline)?
Nope. According to Einstein’s theory his ageless appearance is due to time dilation (if you want to delve into what that is, click here). This happens as time speeds up relative to the observer. So because Santa is travelling so fast, he’s actually aging more slowly than he would if he was moving at our speed.
You can’t bottle that and sell it on drugstore shelves.
So the next time your kid bombards you with questions about Santa or even doubts for a second that Santa isn’t real, tease your hair, slap on a fake moustache and start teaching them some science – Christmas style.
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