I don’t know how you spend your December, but part of it really ought to be done watching the Aardman Animation film Arthur Christmas. It inspired me to ponder a mathematical-physics question that got into some heady territory and this is a good time to point people back to that.
The first piece is Could `Arthur Christmas’ Happen In Real Life? At one point in the movie Arthur and Grand-Santa are stranded on a Caribbean island while the reindeer and sleigh, without them, go flying off in a straight line. This raises the question of what is a straight line if you’re on the surface of something spherical like the Earth. Also, Grand-Santa is such a fantastic idea for the Santa canon it’s hard to believe that Rankin-Bass never did it.
Returning To Arthur Christmas was titled that because I’d left the subject for a couple weeks. You know how it gets. Here the discussion becomes more spoiler-y. And it has to address the question of what kind of straight line the reindeer might move in. There’s several possible answers and they’re all interesting.
Arthur Christmas And The Least Common Multiple supposes that reindeer move as way satellites do. By making some assumptions about the speed of the reindeer and the path they’re taking, I get to see how long Arthur and Grand-Santa would need to wait before the reindeer and sled are back if they’re lucky enough to be waiting on the equator.
Six Minutes Off makes the problem of Arthur and Grand-Santa waiting for the return of flying reindeer more realistic. This involves supposing that they’re not on the equator, which makes meeting up the reindeer a much nastier bit of timing. If they get unlucky it could make their rescue take over five thousand years, which would complicate the movie’s plot some.
And finally Arthur Christmas and the End of Time gets into one of those staggering thoughts. This would be recurrence, an idea that weaves into statistical mechanics and that seems to require that we accept how the conservation of energy and the fact of entropy are, together, a paradox. So we get into considerations of the long-term fate of the universe. Maybe.
nebusresearch 