Yes Einstein, There is a Santa Claus
By Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof
December 16, 2012
I recently came across a copy of Francis Church’s 1897 famous editorial, “Yes,
Virginia, There is a Santa Claus,” and it made me feel a little ashamed of myself.
Church’s iconic reply to a little girl’s question about the existence of Santa Claus, you
may recall, chides unbelievers for believing in only what they can see. “They think
that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds,”1 he wrote. I
must admit, I’ve often likened the superstitious beliefs of others to a belief in Santa
Claus and now find myself more than a little embarrassed for being so closedminded. “Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus,”
Church explained, “The most real things in the world are those that neither children
nor men can see.”2
As a rational mystic who embraces the unknown as much I do the authority
of science and reason, I stand rightfully admonished, have since used both science
and reason to further explore the question, and am now much more open to the
possibility of Santa’s existence. Regarding Church’s assertion that “the most real
things in this world” are those which cannot be seen, for instance, science reminds
us that the human eye only perceives between 400 nanometers to about 700
nanometers of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning there are certain kinds of
light we can’t see at all. But this doesn’t mean the rest of the spectrum and what it
illuminates isn’t there, it just means our eyes haven’t evolved to comprehend
everything. We can’t see the ultraviolet wavelength, for example, that allows some
insects to better detect the pollen and nectar they depend upon.
Our visual range is also rather limited. Even those with 20/20 vision can’t
recognize a face much beyond 65 feet away. Nor can we focus very closely on what’s
right before us, which is why we need prosthetic devices like microscopes to see
cells, jet propulsion laboratories to explore particles, and binoculars or telescopes to
see far away. We can’t detect x-rays either, even though we know they’re real, which
is why we can’t see past what’s right in front of us. If we could, the world would
appear entirely different. We’d all live in glass houses because the walls of our
homes would seem transparent, and all our friends would look like skeletons. So, as
valuable as human vision is, having evolved to see what is most necessary for our
own survival, there is much more to the world than meets the eye, much more than
what little we’re able to perceive between just a millimeter and a few feet away. For
the most part we are blind to most everything in the Universe. On a quantum level,
as Cosmologist Michael Turner recently explained to NPR’s Ira Flatow, “Roughly
speaking, dark matter accounts for about 25 percent of the universe, and dark
From the Editorial Page of The New York Sun, written by Francis P. Church, September 21,
1897.
2 Ibid.
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Yes Einstein, There is a Santa Claus
energy 70 percent with the stuff you and I are made of, weighing in at 4.5 percent.”3
So, yes, I agree with Church’s assertion that “the most real things in the universe”
are invisible.
But this admission alone does not justify the Church’s belief in Santa Claus…
excuse me… Church’s belief in Santa Claus. So, to begin, it seems the most logical
thing to do is ask ourselves if there’s any proof that a person named Santa Claus
exists or has ever existed. So I’ve spent some time recently exploring the work of
several Christmas scholars in my quest for the historical Santa. He may have since
ascended to a higher state of being, but it turns out Santa Claus got his start almost
2000 years ago as a mere mortal.
He was born to a prosperous family around 245 CE in Patara, Turkey. After
his father died, young Nicholas began anonymously giving his inherited fortune
away to the poor, especially to needy children. As he grew older he was named
Bishop of Myra, named after myrrh, a rare incense legend suggests was one of the
gifts given to Jesus upon his birth. While there, Nicholas supposedly performed
several miracles, including one in which he helped three impoverished sisters avoid
a life a prostitution simply because their family could not afford the dowries
necessary for them to marry. Upon learning of their plight, he secretively tossed a
sack of gold through their window while they were sleeping, enough to pay for one
marriage. The next night he did the same for a second marriage. But when he found
the window locked on a third night, he climbed the roof and dropped another sack
of gold down the chimney. When the townsfolk heard about it, they began the
practice of hanging stockings by their fireplaces in the hope of awakening to find
gold inside—a ritual that remains a Christmas tradition to this day.
Santologist, Roger Highfield, says, “St. Nicholas probably died sometime in
the mid-fourth century… The earliest Byzantine portraits show him with a long
white beard, and when the reformed church spread throughout Europe, he became
linked with Christmas because his feast day is 6 December.”4 Years later, when
Martin Luther protested gifts being given to children in his name, St. Nicholas
became even more associated with children and was portrayed, for a period, to be
always accompanied by the Christ child, called “Christkindlein,” a name pronounced
in English as “Kriss Kringle.” As the legend evolved, the smaller image of the child
morphed into a dwarf, and later into the idea that Santa hangs out with elves. It was
from the Dutch pronunciation of “St. Nicholas,” Sinterklaas, that we have all come to
call him Santa Claus.
That is a brief synopsis of what we know of the historical Santa and the
legends that evolved around him, none of which suggests, however, that he is
somehow still alive today and able to deliver presents to the world’s children in a
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/22/155582846/more-to-the-universe-than-meets-the-eye
Highfield, Roger, The Physics of Christmas, Little Brown and Company, New York, NY, 1998,
1999, p. 13.
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Yes Einstein, There is a Santa Claus
single night. The skeptics among us might argue that he is no more than a clever
marketing ploy meant to get their parents to make more holiday purchases. In fact,
“When it comes to the kind of Santa that we see stalking shopping malls and TV
today,” Professor Highfield says, “the jolly, fat figure clad in red and white—a
leading manufacturer of carbonated beverages claims the credit for that
archetype.”5 That’s right, Coca-Cola, which in 1997 celebrated Santa’s 65th birthday,
commissioned the first rendering of Santa dressed in his “ample red coat trimmed in
white and held in place with a thick leather belt.”6 In other words, since 1931 Santa
Claus has been dressing like a soda can!
Now if you’ll indulge me for a moment, here’s where things start go get
interesting, and where reason alone is no longer enough to speculate about Santa’s
existence. We must now turn to science to help us explain the possibility. For you
see, until 1929, just two years before the commissioning of Santa’s red and white
suit, Coca-Cola still contained actual cocaine in its recipe. So which came first, CocaCola’s red and white rendering of Santa, or a red and white vision of Santa that was
later turned into a rendering? Had the company’s advertisers been doing a little too
much personal research with the product (if you know what I mean) when they
came up with this crazy image of jolly old Saint Nick hopped up on coke?
It may seem like a chicken or the egg question, but as it turns out,
researchers studying the effects of, so called, hallucinogens have discovered the
visions often seen under their influence are, as the song goes, “beginning to look a
lot like Christmas.” According to Patrick Harding of Sheffield University, those
shaman who ingested fly agaric, for example, a powerful psychoactive mushroom,
found in Northern Europe where the Santa Claus myth originated, are prone to
seeing the red and white color scheme associated with Christmas. As Harding
explains, “The spirits would, the shaman hoped, help him to deal with pressing
problems, such as an outbreak of sickness in the village. With luck, after his
hallucinatory flight across the skies, he would return bearing the gifts of medical
knowledge from the gods.”7 He goes on to suggest, “Santa’s jolly ‘Ho, ho, ho’ is the
euphoric laugh of someone who has indulged in the mushroom,” and, “the big man’s
fondness for popping down chimneys is an echo of how the shaman would drop into
a yurt, an ancient tent-like dwelling made of birch and reindeer hide.”8 Speaking of
reindeer, it may be their close association with Santa Claus stems from the rather
crude fact that reindeer are fond of licking the “yellow” snow left by an entranced
shaman, which contains more than enough of the psychoactive compound to effect
them as well. It gives new meaning to the notion of flying reindeer.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 20.
7 Highfield, Roger, The Physics of Christmas, Little Brown and Company, New York, NY, 1998,
1999, p. 21.
8 Ibid.
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Yes Einstein, There is a Santa Claus
Let us further posit that these psychoactive compounds, as many who study
them believe, don’t merely cause hallucinations, but actually open doorways to
other realities, to a spectrum of light, if you will, we cannot see with the naked eye.
Science tells us that they do actually impact the optic nerve, meaning, whether
hallucinations or not, whatever is being seen under their influence is truly being
seen. Could it be that Santa Claus now lives on another plain of existence, or in
another dimension that coked up marketing agents managed to tap into while in an
altered state of consciousness?
This may sound unlikely, but it’s no more fantastic than the notion there’s a
parallel universe in which the Earth was NOT hit by a destructive asteroid 65
million years ago, leaving dinosaurs to evolve into the world’s most intelligent
creatures, including having their own versions of cars, airplanes, spaceships and
computers. But that’s exactly what David Deutsch, the scientist who first came up
with multiverse theory believes must be true. “Do you really think there are such
universes, in which dinosaurs have all those things?” He was once asked.
“Undoubtedly,” Deutsch replied without hesitation. “That’s what the laws of physics
tell us.”9 Multiverse theory, according to astrophysicist J. Richard Gott, author of
Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe, brings us “close to Einstein’s original
conception”10 of the Universe. With the discovery of the Higgs boson, or, so called,
“God particle,” earlier this year, furthermore, we are closer that ever to proving
string theory, that there are the four outward visible dimensions (three dimensional
space, and one-dimensional time) but also six dimensions that are curled up and
invisible.
What if Santa Claus lives in one of these invisible dimensions and has found a
way to interact in our own at will? Then, perhaps, under the influence of certain
consciousness expanding compounds and circumstances, the human mind can be
opened enough to perceive these extra dimensions, along with some of its residents,
including a red and white clad Santa. Francis Church told Virginia, “There is a veil
covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united
strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart.” But what if he’s
wrong? What if there is a way to open it and Santa Claus knows how?
So, in the name of open-mindedness, let’s assume Santa Claus was born of
human parents 2000 years ago, but has since ascended to some other plain of
existence while maintaining the power to return to our world whenever he feels like
it. If so, how does he travel to every child’s house in a single night? How does he
know what every child wants for Christmas? In short, how does he violate so many
laws of physics? Was he born a man who became a god? We must admit, he does
look a lot like Michelangelo’s famous depiction of God on the Sistine Chapel. More
Brown, Julian, Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 2000,
p. 18.
10 Gott, Richard J., Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York,
NY, 2001, p. 163.
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Yes Einstein, There is a Santa Claus
importantly, he also seems to demonstrate the three basic qualities theologians have
traditionally ascribed to God—omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience.
Fortunately science can also help us understand how Santa can accomplish
all this without us defaulting to such superstitious thinking. Without getting too
bogged down in its complexities, for instance, Bell’s Theorem suggests that two
particles paired together can influence each other instantaneously, even if they are
light-years apart and at opposite ends of the Universe. A technology based on this
principle could enable a person to move instantly from one place to another without
traveling through linear space. Even so, Highfield calculates, given an average of 2.5
children per household, adding up to 842 million chimneys, multiplied by the
average distance between houses, means Santa must travel 221 million miles on
Christmas Eve. So even if he could teleport himself instantly from house to house, he
would have less than 2/10,000 of a second to spend at each house, presuming he
begins at the International Date Line at midnight December 24th, and travels
backward against the Earth’s rotation, actually allowing him 48 hours to get the job
done.11
Although this seems impossible from our perspective, it may be that Santa
has learned to take advantage of Einstein’s theory of relativity by traveling at the
speed of light in order to experience time differently than we do. As North Carolina
State University physics professor, Larry Silverberg, has explained, “In the relativity
cloud, because time moves much slower for us, [Santa] sees us as basically frozen.
He doesn’t need to hurry. He has all the time in the world.”12 Relatively speaking,
then, from Santa’s perspective, he’s moving at a normal speed while we are standing
still, and from our perspective he’s moving too fast to be seen.
It may also be that Santa has simply discovered a way to clone himself, or to
take advantage of the countless Santa Clauses that exist in other parallel universes.
Who knows, there may even be a Dinosaur Santa from the Dinosaur dimension?
This, after all, is the basis for the theory of quantum computing. In short, some
scientists believe that on a quantum level all the universes in the Multiverse are
connected, and computers calculating on a quantum level could take advantage of
information in trillions of universes at once. So if Santa Claus has devised a means of
connecting with all his other selves in the Multiverse, it may be that, rather than
overcoming time, he has the power to be several places at once, perhaps assigning a
version of himself to every neighborhood. This doesn’t seem so difficult, the U.S.
Postal Service does the same thing everyday. This would also explain how Santa is
able to appear in every mall in America at once.
None of this, however, explains his other spatial problem, cramming enough
toys in his sled to provide for all the children in the world. Yet the solution to this
problem would also be simple to someone who has discovered how to travel
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Highfield, ibid., p. 241f.
Ibid., p. 246.
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Yes Einstein, There is a Santa Claus
interdimensionally. Most likely Santa’s sack is really the end of a wormhole through
which he reaches into a toy warehouse that remains centrally located. Wormholes
are thought to be tubes or tunnels in space through which it may be possible to take
shortcuts through both space and time. If Santa has actually discovered such a
wormhole and is able to carry one end of it around in his sack, it might be that he
can reach instantly into his workshop from anywhere on the planet.
This resolves his ability to simulate omnipotence and omnipresence, but how
about his seeming omniscience? How does Santa know who’s been naughty or nice?
Can he really see them when they’re sleeping? Does he know when they’re awake? It
could simply be that Santa, like Jack Bauer on the hit TV show, 24, utilizes an
elaborate system of satellites to keep an eye on all of us, and can hone in on anyone,
anywhere in the world. Like the fictional Counter Terrorism Unit that Bauer works
for, Santa may have thousands of helpers who keep an eye on us from above and are
able to issue annual behavioral reports to Santa before he sets out each Christmas
Eve.
Highfield suggests, alternatively, that he may actually be reading the minds of
children using, “a technique called magnetoencephalography, which uses a Squid (a
superconducting quantum interference device) to detect minute magnetic fields
generated by the cackle of brain activity. Sophisticated signal-processing methods
are then used by Santa to filter the data and ascertain who the children are, where
they live, and whether they’ve been good or bad. This data is transferred to an
onboard sleigh guidance system, which uses a computer to plan the most efficient
route of delivery.”13
Christmas is known as the “Season of Giving,” but for me, this year, in light of
all this evidence and mystery, it is also a “Season of Believing.” Whether from a
perspective of faith in a Santa Claus born as a man who performed miracles and
ascended to another realm of existence in which he now resides as a God, with
omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent powers; or from a scientific perspective
through which he takes advantage of relativity, wormholes, quantum computers,
space satellites, and mind-reading machines, why not give Santa the benefit of the
doubt, at least for one magical night each year? So Dear Santa, if you are an allknowing, all-present, and all-powerful God, or just a common man making use of
sophisticated satellites and listening devices, please answer our prayers this
Christmas for peace on Earth and good will toward all. “Ah, Virginia, in all this world
there is nothing else real and abiding. No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives, and he
lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand
years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
13
Ibid. p. 250f.
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