by Gregory Mone
One of the biggest perceived difficulties with wormholes is keeping the mouths—the entrances and exits—to the tunnels from closing up. Gravity collapses things, so, to build a working wormhole, you’d need something to counteract that inward pull. One physicist has suggested that you would need the negative-energy equivalent of a Jupiter-sized chunk of mass to prevent a mouth just one meter wide from closing. That’s the mass of roughly 318 Earths converted into energy. So, you know, it would be really hard to do.
Lobo suggests that a version of the dark energy astrophysicists have been buzzing about, called phantom energy, might also prove effective. The same stuff that’s pushing the cosmos apart could counteract gravity and keep the mouth wide open. Lobo writes that recent theoretical work on phantom energy has “far-reaching physical and cosmological implications, namely, apart from being used for interstellar shortcuts, an absurdly advanced civilization may convert [wormholes] into time machines.”
In his original paper, Thorne suggests that an “infinitely advanced civilization” might be able to make this work. Lobo talks about an “absurdly advanced civilization.” None of these papers mention Santa explicitly, but this can probably be attributed to the fact that the scientists don’t know about the aliens, who have absurdity and advancement in large quantities.
They are also incredible planners. The transit system they established for Santa’s operations was designed to be scaled up along with the rest of his operation, and it works primarily through chimneys and windows. The average home is connected, via wormhole, to two other homes. In other words, each house has an “entrance” and an “exit” mouth. Typically, the former is located in the living room window and the latter in the fireplace or within the frame of a painting. (Honestly, has anyone ever really seen him enter through a chimney? No.) If one of Santa’s lieutenants wants to exit a home, he simply jumps through the wormhole mouth in the fireplace or the frame. A moment later he pops out of a window at his next destination.
In a way, this system defies some of the logic inherent in modern wormhole research, which typically suggests that these strange tunnels would be most useful in facilitating astronomical shortcuts, or hops from one galaxy to another instead of one home to another. This apparent contradiction shouldn’t lead us to suspect that Santa is trying to mislead us, though. Instead, we should think of it as yet another testament to the brilliance of his alien benefactors. They are so far beyond us in their understanding of the universe that the equations our theorists diddle with today must look as simplistic as cave paintings to them.
Also, the house-to-house link isn’t true in every case. Some homes are linked back to the North Pole—otherwise Santa wouldn’t be able to begin his journey by diving through that first portal—and others join up with warehouses, for reasons to be explained in chapter 32.
This transit system has proven to be tremendously effective, but by the late 1990s, Santa was actually approaching the upper limit on the number of homes his lieutenants could visit via wormhole, due to the phenomenal energy requirements. Santa only has a finite amount of energy available each year, and he was nearly exhausting it to keep all those wormhole mouths from collapsing under the pressure of gravity. Coincidentally, his waistline mandate has removed this cap for the foreseeable future. The average diameter of a lieutenant’s waist has shrunk considerably, which means that the wormhole mouths don’t need to be as wide, either. (The lieutenants all dive in headfirst.) And because the mouths are smaller, the amount of negative energy each one burns is smaller, too. So, skinnier Santas are better in more ways than one.
The true beauty of Santa’s wormhole-based travel technique, though, is that it enables his lieutenants to recover the time they lose dropping off gifts in a given house. Each wormhole deposits a lieutenant in the next living room on his schedule a few hundredths or tenths of a second after he arrived in the previous one. As a result, at any moment, a given lieutenant may actually be working in thousands of different homes at once. By the time he visits three houses, roughly ninety seconds have elapsed for him, but because he time-travels, a mere fraction of a second has passed on Earth.
Wormholes may be an effective means of cramming nearly a year’s worth of work into the span of a few hours, but they’re not perfect. They are extremely dangerous, and sometimes unstable. This is one of the reasons the OC rewards his lieutenants so generously, and it’s also why he refuses to travel via wormhole himself, relying instead on a warp-drive-enhanced sleigh.
The OC loses one Santa to a wormhole-related accident, on average, every other Christmas. This is far worse than the mortality rates for commercial fishing, mining, and truck driving, three of America’s most dangerous jobs. And these wormhole glitches offer a death that’s just as frightening as falling over the side of a boat into the frigid sea or slowly asphyxiating in a partially collapsed mine. A mismanaged or malfunctioning throat can send a person to an alternate and considerably less jolly universe, crush him like a steamroller flattening a grasshopper, or hit him with so much radiation that his cells fry like eggs. (This might explain why Santa and his lieutenants drink so much nog. It may not be a celebratory drink at all, but a crutch that helps them dull the painful memories of lost comrades.)
Sometimes these breakdowns are the result of simple mechanical malfunctions, but on occasion, prying children may be at fault. That’s right, kids: You can kill Santa Claus.
A Few Brief Thoughts About the Effects of Time Travel on Book Reading
At this point you might be thinking that you should skip the next chapter because, based on the logic of the last one, you’ve already read it. And if you have any sort of confidence in yourself, you’re probably assuming that you understood the ideas expressed therein, too.
This is a totally reasonable assumption. After all, the lieutenants’ time-traveling, their whole process of moving forward and then backward in time as they visit all those homes, suggests that the past, present, and future all coexist. They’re simultaneous. In other words, the future has already happened. We don’t need to bother reading difficult chapters because we’ve already read and, presumably, taken the time to understand them, in the future.
So, honestly, what did you think? No, don’t answer that.
The fact is that even if this were the case, which isn’t clear, then one could argue that the coexistence of the past/present/future should actually strengthen your resolve as a reader. By lazily refusing to absorb the next chapter on the grounds that you’ve already read it at some point a few minutes or hours or weeks from now, you’ll risk unalterably changing that future. This seemingly harmless act could change the course of your life, or someone else’s, forever. You could prevent the Chicago Cubs from winning the World Series or force your unborn grandchild to one day flunk a critical entrance exam. And if that were the case, Santa definitely wouldn’t bring you any presents.
Thankfully, there is also another option. If, in reading this book, you have acquired enough knowledge about the universe to construct your own time machine, then you could, after reading the next chapter, use that time machine to unread it. This would be much more tolerable, morally, than refusing to read.
Ideally, you would travel back to the moment you began reading this chapter, stop yourself, maybe pour a refreshing drink, and skip ahead to chapter 22. This is assuming, of course, that you didn’t put down the book for a few hours, days, or weeks because of this chapter. If that’s the case, you should just try to forget the experience and forgo the time traveling. Now that you have a time machine, you should know that it’s very important to avoid canceling or reliving large chunks of your life because of a few paragraphs of text. A few minutes, sure. But no more.
21
How to Kill a Santa
CHRISTMAS EVE, TIME TRAVEL, AND THE TROUBLE WITH CAUSALITY
Every Santa-loving child is told to refrain from sneaking out in the middle of the night to take a look under the tree, but parents rarely explain why this is such a problem.
Which is totally understandable. Most seven-year-olds don’t take to lectures on causality.
Berkeley astrophysicist Richard Muller thinks that Santa’s refusal to drop off presents for kids who catch a midnight glimpse of the tree may not just be principle. The thing about time travel is that it would very likely come with a few rules. For instance, some scientists have suggested that the universe will only permit time travel if it doesn’t interfere with causality. With regards to Santa, Muller says this translates to: “He can’t change events that have already happened.”
Generally, time-travel paradoxes are framed in terms of dramatic actions. Going back in time and killing your father before you were conceived, for example. The implications of that one are brain-crushingly difficult to ponder. But causality probably wouldn’t apply solely to big decisions. Muller says that something as simple as a little girl sneaking out of her room and staring at her Christmas tree for fifteen minutes constitutes an event, in the physics sense. Once the light from the little multicolored bulbs on the tree and the photons reflecting off the wrapped gifts reach that girl’s eyes, the event is done. Finished. Immutable. She has seen what she has seen, and her observation cannot be altered.
If time travel can’t violate causality, which Muller suggests may be the case, this means that Santa’s lieutenants can’t travel back and visit that girl’s living room during the time she was staring at the tree. While he was busy with his other deliveries, she had already watched the tree and had not seen him. The event had already taken place.
Consider the following scenario involving one of Santa’s favorite helpers, a jocular Norwegian named Knut. (Away from the North Pole, each of the lieutenants answers only to Santa, Kris, St. Nick, or other common nicknames, but Mrs. Claus and the OC refer to them by their given names. For purposes of clarity I’ll do the same.) Let’s say Knut is scheduled to visit this little girl’s home at 12:02 A.M. Remember: Knut’s 12:02 isn’t her 12:02. Since Santa’s lieutenants can travel back in time, Knut can let that first 12:02 elapse without worrying about falling behind. He can let time pass, and then return back to 12:02 to finish the job on time.
But if that little girl sits and stares at the tree from, say, midnight to 12:15, then her living room becomes off-limits. A time-travel no-fly zone. Knut couldn’t go back in time to visit that room because the girl had already sat through those fifteen minutes without seeing him. An event, or observation, will have occurred, and Knut cannot overturn it. He wouldn’t be able to visit that room because it would have already been established that he didn’t. “This,” according to Muller, “is why if little children get up and sneak a peek at the tree, Santa can’t come.”
Now, what if causality doesn’t place these exact bounds on the lieutenants’ rounds, and a few hundred children randomly step out into their living rooms and witness the same Santa, at the same “time”? What if each of these children simultaneously observes Knut? This implies that there are several hundred copies of the same person in different places in the world. Or it could mean that there are several hundred versions of our world existing in different universes at the same time, and in each one, Knut is in a different house, being witnessed by a different child.
Muller suggests that this possibility may have profound implications for the history of science. “The presence of Santa in many locations ‘simultaneously’ really bothered Einstein,” he says. “I speculate that it was his wrestling with the Santa problem that really led Einstein to try to figure out the meaning of simultaneity. I am convinced that Santa’s ability to travel in time led directly to Einstein’s invention of relativity theory.”
This is a provocative notion, and entirely plausible, but the important thing to consider here is what sort of bounds all of this places on Santa’s rounds. Causality-related rules would add a whole new dimension of complexity to the travel schedule. If Knut’s elfish coordinators fail to pick up on the fact that the little girl has ventured into the living room (unlikely, given all the in-home surveillance equipment that becomes operational on Christmas Eve) and do not provide him with a new route, what happens? Does the universe, anticipating a violation of causality, shut down the mouth of the wormhole that leads into the girl’s living room? If this were the case, Knut might unknowingly dive into the other end of that wormhole, expecting to turn up in the girl’s living room, and emerge in an alternate universe instead. He’d probably die. By sneaking a look at the tree, then, that little girl will have killed Santa. Or Knut, at least.
Yet it may be that the entire wormhole—both mouths and the tunnel that joins them—collapses. In this case, Knut would be forced to hit the pavement. His elfish minders would have to find him another wormhole, another way to resume his rounds, much like a bank robber who has to find a different escape route after the driver of his getaway car gets the jitters and bails. But how would causality apply here? Would Knut have to avoid being spotted by anyone? Could he not step on a single twig, kick a single stone or cigarette butt? And what’s the difference between a girl witnessing him and some moonlight bouncing off his soft red hat—aren’t they both events, in the physical sense? All valid questions, but unfortunately, these details are unavailable, and it would be intellectually and morally irresponsible to speculate.
But still. If these causality rules really do apply, then Knut would also have to worry about running into, or at least spotting, himself. Think about it. Say Knut finishes his rounds in house A, then slips through a wormhole into house B, which is right across the street. As he does so, he travels back in time roughly 29.99 seconds. So, when he emerges in house B, his former self will still be hard at work in house A. What if he decides to look through the window? What if he decides to just have a peek, to see whether the lights of that family’s Christmas tree are favorable to his fair Norwegian complexion? It may be that the universe forbids the action. It may not even be possible. But Santa’s elves take serious precautions to prevent his lieutenants from checking themselves out.
22
Time Travel and Delivery Tracking
HOW GPS PREVENTS SANTA FROM RUNNING INTO HIMSELF
Elves are quite possibly the most maligned, misunderstood group of Santa’s helpers. Yes, they are hardworking, celibate, and short, but they are not simple craftsmen, as they are so often portrayed. Elves are highly skilled technical-support professionals, and in no area is this role more crucial than the scheduling of each Christmas Eve’s deliveries. These tiny folk are masters of logistics.
Each Santa has to visit anywhere from 750,000 to one million homes, but, as we’ve established, the shortcuts created by wormhole-based time travel render the distance between two consecutive living rooms irrelevant. Since his lieutenants aren’t really traveling through standard space-time, it’s no faster for a given Santa to move from a mansion in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to another across the street than it is for him to jump from there to a cabin in Belarus. As a result, each lieutenant’s route actually covers a large stretch of the globe. Instead of going from house to house in a given neighborhood, he actually crisscrosses the planet to avoid running into any of his former selves.
The lieutenants don’t accomplish this through some kind of heightened intuition. The elves plan out Santa’s route in advance, and his travels are monitored and altered, if necessary, via the Lieutenant Santa Tracking System, or LiSTS, software program. To keep tabs on all those men, each Santa is outfitted with a highly precise GPS receiver. They don’t work when the lieutenants are within a wormhole, but whenever a Santa is in our normal universe, inside a living room or studio apartment or mud hut, these high-powered devices repeatedly receive signals from a series of satellites, derive each lieutenant’s precise coordinates, and feed them back to LiSTS to ensure each man is on schedule.
Now, the trick with this system is the fact that whenever a given Santa time-travels and re-emerges in a new home, his receiver goes with him. From Knut’s perspective, he only has one GPS device, and he keeps it with him the whole time as
he moves from house to house.
But consider his elfish minder’s point of view, sitting at his desk at the Pole. As Knut moves from the first house on his route to the second, he also skips back in time slightly less than thirty seconds. So, from the non-time-traveling elf’s perspective, when he and his receiver arrive in the second house, he’s still in the first one, too. And since Knut brings his receiver with him, the Pole’s tracking system will register two copies of the same device. A second Santa will appear on the elf’s screen. An instant later, after Knut time-travels again, rewinding another 29.9 seconds or so as he moves on to the third house, a third blip appears. From the perspective of LiSTS, there are now three exact copies of the same GPS receiver on the grid.
(Since GPS systems do depend on the accuracy of their clocks, the whole wormhole-time-travel technique did create a few technical headaches in the initial trials, but the elves, who have become incredibly skilled coders, fixed the bugs.)
The Pole’s global map, which shows the locations of all copies of each Santa, is even more fantastic. If the whole operation starts with 267 Santas, then 267 GPS receivers leave the Pole to visit the first homes on their lists. Initially, 267 receivers register. Yet just a hundredth of a second or so later, after all those lieutenants have time-traveled for the first time, the number of receivers doubles and 534 devices turn up. A beat later, after the second clock-rewinding trip, that count doubles again, reaching 1,068.
What about causality? Good question. LiSTS was designed specifically to account for time-travel paradoxes; it positively gorges on memory as a result. But the elves are probably not allowed to follow these tracking dots on-screen. If they were to watch Knut for the first thirty seconds of his trip, for example, he wouldn’t be able to rewind the clock as he moved to his next house. Because of these limitations, the elves do most of their work prior to Christmas Eve, when they plan each lieutenant’s route in LiSTS. (Incidentally, Santa licenses a modified version of the software to UPS for package tracking. In fact, UPS executives regularly lead panel discussions on logistics at the Strategic Elvis Convention, which explains why they have, on more than one occasion, mistakenly slipped into Presleyesque accents at their own annual shareholder meetings and left investors amused but stupefied.) The program alerts them if any two points along a route are too close in space and time. When Santa and his lieutenants are actually out completing their rounds, LiSTS can adjust these routes autonomously. On rare occasions, though, the elves might be called upon to alert a given lieutenant that he has to change course or urge him to forgo an unscheduled nap (see the next chapter). But for the most part, they spend the evening watching Tim Allen’s Santa Clause movies in their rooms. Why not sleep? They’re too excited. In fact, none of Santa’s workers get much rest on Christmas Eve.