For those of you who like to continue to believe, I offer the following explanation as a rebuttal to the "Engineer's Perspective"
The secret is that he slows time down for the rest of us, so he can move about freely while most of us are virtually frozen in place. So he can make millions of trips to and from his warehouses to all the kids' homes. He can accomplish this through the use of a little known portion of the general theory of relativity having to do with the relative rotations of electrons at super-cooled temperatures (that's why he has to live at the North Pole, by the way). Santa's elves discovered long ago that when you vibrate super-cooled electrons using loud sounds at a very specific wavelength, they give off special quarks that interact with the neutrinos in the interstellar medium and the aurora borealis (this is, by the way, why Santa has to fly so high in the atmosphere). This causes time to dilate for everyone except Santa and his sleigh (including reindeer), to one billionth of the pace that it normally runs. As it turns out, the specific wavelength of sound that is needed corresponds precisely with the wavelength of the deep bass "HO,HO,HO" which Santa has perfected.
The details of how this works are beyond the scope of this presentation. The reindeer don't actually fly as we normally think of it. Because time is so slowed down around them, they are able to actually attach themselves to clumps of photons that they see moving slowly by. This is, by the way, why they needed Rudolph's bright nose in the classic story. It wasn't just to see; it was also because they needed the light to help them stay aloft. The time dilation factor is the reason why almost no one has actually seen Santa flying by in his sleigh. Clement Moore was able to write his classic poem "A Visit from St. Nick" when an unusual alignments of planets caused the energy from a distant quasar to be focused directly on the grounds surrounding his house in New York at the precise moment when Santa arrived that night back in the 18th century. The energy amplified the time dilation effect that surrounded the sleigh, and expanded it to include the house. For this reason, Moore was able to watch Santa in what he believed was real time. Incidentally, this time dilation effect means that Santa himself spends an incredible amount of his actual time delivering the presents on Christmas Eve. It's not unusual for him to spend years of his own lifetime every Christmas Eve delivering packages. All this effort (plus the energy he expends yelling "HO,HO,HO" every few seconds to maintain the effect) wears him out. Fortunately, Santa pauses every once in a while to rest while delivering presents, and since he spends some of his time with Mrs. Claus he is able to produce descendants. So, each year what you see is a different Santa - the son or grandson of the last year's Santa. That explains why, if you go back to the same department store year after year, Santa sometimes looks a little different (fatter, thinner, glasses, spots of dark hair behind his white beard, etc.) It's really a different Santa every year. In fact, this constant substitution of the new Santa for the old has inspired stories like the comic strip "The Phantom", or the TV show "Lassie,” where they used several generations of look alike dogs. Since I've learned these details, my real concern about Santa has to do with how he will cope in the future when mankind has developed interstellar travel at "relativistic" speeds. No one has ever positively determined whether the time dilation effect he has perfected is cancelled out by the effect of time travel at near light speeds, or whether it is compounded! Obviously, if compounded, he will have no problem travelling all over the galaxy on Christmas Eve (although, obviously, it will take several generations of Santa's to do just one Christmas). If, on the other hand, the effect is cancelled, then Santa would have to actually operate in "real time", which means Christmas would have to be cancelled. I've been working diligently on trying to solve this problem, which explains why I've made so little progress on solving the problems of global warming or world hunger. Anyway, at least for the near future, Santa Claus is definitely coming to town!
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