A physicist has explained how Santa Claus manages to deliver all the presents overnight

Every December, the same questions come up: how does Father Christmas manage to fly around the planet overnight - and why is this even physically impossible? German physicist Metin Tolan offers an unexpected (and clearly humorous) solution: Christmas is saved by quantum physics.

In his book "Stille Nacht, eilige Nacht" ("Silent Night, Hurried Night"), Tolan takes as his starting point the assumption that Santa "definitely exists" and goes on to make calculations that usually lead to a grim conclusion: the traditional version of a sleigh ride in the real world would end in disaster.

2708 visits per second and tens of millions of kilometres

According to the estimates the author cites, Santa would have to visit hundreds of millions of households - at a rate of about thousands of visits per second. Even if you "play" with time by travelling against the Earth's rotation, the load remains prohibitive. The book describes other bottlenecks: the monstrous speed required, overheating, enormous energy costs and the weight of the load (if we imagine that each child receives at least one present).

Why NORAD and the "wrong number" come to mind here

A separate Christmas legend, which the material recalls, was the story of an accidental call: in 1955, because of a wrongly printed number, children called not Santa, but the Air Defence Centre (the predecessor of NORAD). Duty Officer Harry Shoup didn't want to ruin the tale - thus was born the tradition of NORAD Tracks Santa, when the military "tracks" Santa's route each year.

"Santa's Wave" and superposition

Tolan's main twist is quantum. He appeals to the ideas of quantum theory, where an object can be described as a wave and where a superposition of states is possible. In such a "thought experiment" Santa turns into a kind of "matter wave" that is simultaneously present at all possible points (i.e. all houses), and the attempt to see him leads to a "collapse" - and, within this humorous logic, destroys the story itself.

The material emphasises: this is not an instruction manual "how to become an immortal Santa quantum object", but rather a set of spectacular facts and calculations for a festive conversation - with scientific humour and references to real principles of physics.