Occam's Razor has its uses in that it is a great way to weed out the crackpot ideas in any given situation. If your cell phone is not getting reception, Occam's Razor might knock out the idea that aliens are trying to block your phone call in order to probe your mind for information on a future invasion. The simple answer is your carrier just sucks. But sometimes the question can be so complex that Occam's Razor, though prudent, leaves an answer just not accepted by everyone. Let us take the creation of the universe.

The Problem: Santa Claus

The problem with Santa Claus is that people have poured two parts Occam's Razor and one part faith in to a big glass and swallowed it for too long. People have just accepted that Santa can comfortably live inside the Artic Circle, that a race of elves build year-round for him and, by some act of magic, he and his reindeer can fly around the world and deliver gifts in one night.

I don't buy it. Santa is real – I know this. The notion that parents around the world place presents under the tree after the kids are asleep is absurd and insulting and I refuse to accept that Santa can do what he does simply because of magic. Let's look at Santa Claus for what he is: the greatest innovator of our time. If it's not magic then how in the hell can he do what he does?

The Solutions

Living environment

The first step in to understanding Santa Claus is figure out where he lives and how it is possible. He lives in the North Pole, right? Well, there are a few different “north poles” out there. We have true north, magnetic north, geomagnetic north and the north pole of inaccessibility. I'm serious, that is its real name. None of these four locations sit on real land, but true north, geomagnetic north and the north pole of inaccessibility all sit on ice fields all year round. Magnetic north is simply water, so that's out.

It is safe to assume that Santa does not live at the true North Pole, as a few governments have people and Web cams there, and there does not exist a picture of Santa to date. We can also deduce that he does not live a geomagnetic north, because why would Santa choose to live directly in the path of every compass's needle? People who live far out of the way do it for a reason, and though Santa may remain a mystery to us, why go that far out of the way just to be so easily found? This simple logic leaves us with the north pole of inaccessibility, which is the northernmost point that is farthest from any landmass on earth. It lies at 84°03' north and 174°51' west and, as the name implies, it is rather inaccessible.

It makes sense for a man with so much work to be done in a year to live in quite possibly the least accessible place on earth. But now that we know where he lives we must answer how he and his work force can live in a place that in the winter only has highs of -3 Celsius and is dark for half the year?

There really is only one explanation for how Santa can do it. First we must realize that the north pole of inaccessibility is really an area of flowing ice fields, not land, so Santa's Village would have to float as well as be stable. The second consideration is that he would need an almost unending supply of energy to be able to sustain life, heat the homes and keep the factory's running all year. As I said, these facts point to only one conclusion: Santa's Village is made up of deep-sea oil platforms.

Work force

Story and fable would have us believe that Santa has a group of small elves widdling away with hammer and saw, building toys for the children of the earth. This cannot be the case, however, and if we look at the numbers, Santa might just be the largest employer on the planet.

There are two billion people on the planet under the age of 18, who are thus able to receive gifts from Santa. We all know that adults give other adults presents because they are jealous. We can subtract from that number the amount of children who are not from Christian families, which the Population Reference Bureau tells us brings the number of children to about 378 million, give or take.

Now, 378 million children each receiving an average of 3.7 gifts brings us to a total of 1,398,600,000 toys to be made in a single calendar year. We need to also note that all employees of Santa would not be just laborers, as the red tape and bureaucracy needed to accomplish this task rivals the largest of corporations. McDonald's has 30,000 stores that serve 47 million people a day. We can take the number of stores and multiply by the number of employees at each add the corporate employees which will give us McDonald's workforce:

(30,000 x 48) + 2,500 = 1,442,500 people.

Now if this work force can produce 47 million in a day the number of employees needed to increase production in a given day to almost 1.4 billion is as follows:

(1,398,600,000 / 47,000,000) x [(30,000 x 48) + 2500] = workforce needed for one day.

So for McDonalds to produce as much as Santa does in one day they would need a workforce of 429,278,800. Now of course you are saying that Santa has approximately 360 days to get the job done, so the workforce need not be almost half a billion. But let's look at that has well. The winter climate in the Arctic Circle is not only extremely cold for months on end, but it is also dark all day long for half the year, which is not exactly the perfect working environment. Santa would almost assuredly not work during the winter months except, of course, on the Big Day. That knocks out October through March, leaving Santa with 182 days to build all his toys. If we apply this logic to the equation we can finally answer how many elves work for Santa:

{(1,398,600,000 / 47,000,000) x [(30,000 x 48) + 2500]} / 182 = Santa's workforce

2,358,675 elves!

With that number in hand, and the average oil rig able to accommodate about 130 people, we can place the number of rigs making up Santa Village at about 18,144. Santa's Village must be a sight!

Christmas night

The fateful night that Santa and his 2 million elves have been working toward is now upon us. There are certain assumptions and physical limitations that we must overcome to explain how Santa can do what he does, we will start the discussion with flying reindeer. Though no such creature has been identified to date, science tells us that there are more than 300,000 living species yet to be identified, so we can assume Santa found the reindeer first. That's that.

Next, if we know there are 378 million Christian children on the planet, with a population average of about 3.5 children per home – assuming at least one of those 3.5 is good – Santa must stop at 91.8 million homes on his journey. We also need to note that Santa has 31 hours, not 24, to complete this task if he travels east to west, thanks to the earth's rotation and time zones. By any calculation involving the distance between homes and time spent in each home, we can assume that the total journey that night would be between 60-75 million miles. Santa and his sleigh's speed would have to be somewhere between 550-700 miles per second, or about 3000 times the speed of sound, to accomplish this task.

This provides a major hindrance to Santa. If he and his reindeer traveled at that speed here on earth they run into a few problems with physics. Namely this one:

v ( t ) = 9.8 m/k + ( v ( 0 )+9.8 m/k )e kt/m

Assuming Santa's sleigh to be at least two million tons with each present weighing an average of two pounds, the lead reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second, each. They will burst into flame almost instantaneously. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. So Santa clearly does not travel on earth, now does he? He must travel through space where there is no resistance and he can travel as fast as his reindeer can take him, which could be faster then the speed of sound, for all we know. Animals are capable of amazing things. Just look at the platypus if you don't believe me. This space flight also accounts for the fact that we have no photographic proof of him trotting around in his sleigh.

This is no major stretch of the imagination. If we accept that Santa has build a village with more than two million employees all living on oil rigs in the Arctic Circle we can assume that he has also conquered the mysteries of space flight. If India can do it, so can Santa. The only questions that remain are how can he deliver the packages and who eats all those cookies and drinks all that milk?

As far as the delivery of the gifts goes and the cookies Santa clearly needs some help at this point. Remember the gifts would have been completed in late September and what, two million people just stop working? Hell no, the unions would never allow that. As Santa prepares for his orbital flight, the two million-plus elves are spreading themselves out around the world doing two things: eating cookies and placing receivers. The cookies are a nice perk for Santa – that and awesome health benefits – but the receivers are for the GPS system: The Gift Positioning System.

Much like watching missiles drop on houses from planes flying over Iraq , Santa uses the same GPS system with his elf-placed receivers on the ground to guide each single present to underneath its rightful tree. It has been hard to imagine Santa getting down the chimney when is as fat as they say he is but it is so much easier to imagine the elves getting in that way now isn't it?

Conclusion

See, Santa is not all magic at all. There is a scientific reason for everything he can do, mostly because he's a master engineer, CEO, astronaut, oil tycoon and a generally nice guy. The only question left is why. And for that answer you'll have to write him.

North Pole Cancellations
5400 Mail Trail
Fairbanks AK 99709-9999

I'm serious, try it.