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With Christmas comesa most welcome visitor: Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, call him what you will, he only works one night a year but boy does he deliver. And how do we thank him? We deny his existence! Call him things like a holiday folk myth or literally impossible given the laws of physics!

Well, we at IFLScience have had enough of this disrespect. Santa is real, and we have the receipts. Here are five arguments, from all branches of science and philosophy, that prove that Santa Claus really is Coming To Town.

Logic

Not only is it easy to prove that Santa exists, its also quick in fact, were going to do it in two sentences. Ready?

1. Everything in this list is false;

2. Santa exists.

From those two statements, it follows that Santa is real.

Let us explain: either statement 1 is true, or its false. If its true, then everything in the list is false, which means statement 1 is false. But this is a contradiction we started by assuming that statement 1 is true. Clearly, this is nonsense: a statement cant be true and false. The only option is that statement 1 isnt true at all.

But if statement 1 is false, that means that at least something in the list is true. We know that statement 1 is false, so the only remaining option is for statement 2 to be true: Santa exists, QED.

(While this proof is obviously water-tight, the more persnickety among you might want to look up the Liar Paradox to understand why other arguments similar to this one arent as convincing as they initially seem basically, the first statement is self-referential.

Mathematically speaking, all this is a bit naughty, wrote mathematician Hannah Fry in her 2017 book The Undeniable Existence of Santa Claus. Self-referential statements like these dont actually have to be true or false, which resolves the paradox.

The liar paradox isnt just a handy way to prove the haters wrong on Santa it has some pretty astonishing philosophical repercussions too. Using some incredibly abstract mathematics, in the 1930s the logician Alfred Tarski tried to find a definition of truth that would be, as he put it, adequate typically understated mathematician-speak for irrefutable. Instead, thanks to the liar paradox, he accidentally proved what is now called Tarskis theorem on the undefinability of truth, which is, you imagine, the one thing he didnt want to happen.)

Quantum Physics

Of course, despite all these cast-iron proofs, some scientifically uninformed individuals still find reasons to doubt the existence of Santa. One of the most common reasons given for this apostasy is, on the face of it, fairly convincing: how, people ask, could anybody deliver all those presents in one night without being seen or heard?

Little do these doubters realize, however, that science has long known the answer to Santas apparently super-human courier skills its simple quantum physics.

Let us explain: we already know a lot about how Santa would need to travel on Christmas Eve to get the presents to every child who expects them.

Assuming he has the good sense to travel East to West, we know not just his direction but his speed: eight hours of nighttime spread over 24 time zones gives 31 hours to complete the job. From census data, we can estimate the number of children he has to get to: around 850 million.

That gives Santa a minimum speed of around 300,000 kilometers per second, according to science author Roger Highfield, which is pretty fast. Actually, its incredibly fast: at more than 6,000 times the speed of sound, Santa would be slammed back in his sleigh by forces more than 17,500 times stronger than gravity, and as for Rudolph well, according to one calculation, at those speeds, the friction from the atmosphere would vaporize Santas faithful friends in less than one two-hundredth of a second, taking out more than 214,000 reindeer before the nights work was complete.

We know, that sounds pretty grim, and hardly festive. Luckily, though, those figures contradict the facts on record so clearly, classical mechanics doesnt hold the answer.

But with quantum mechanics, everything falls into place.

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that if we know one variable well, we cannot know the other one exactly, explained high-energy physicist Daniel Tapia Takaki to the BBC. We know what speed Santa will be travelling, but not his position.

Thanks to quantum physics inherent unavoidable weirdness, visiting every home in one night may be possible, Tapia Takaki explained it just requires that Santa be a superposition of quantum states, in other words a collection of Santas diffused all across the planet.

Once we know Santa obeys quantum rules rather than physical ones, it makes a lot more sense why weve never seen him in person. If a child happened to spot him on his mission, Tapia Takaki said, the uncertainty principle would no longer apply.

You would know his exact position, he explained, which would cause the quantum state to collapse and no more presents could be distributed.

Cosmology

Fine, so you havent been convinced so far well this proof is cast-iron. We know Santa exists for one simple reason: we can see him.

Granted, hes not exactly how the festive ads show him: for one thing, hes a couple hundred trillion square kilometers big. Also, hes something like two million degrees in temperature, which at least explains why he spends so much time hanging out at the North Pole the man just needs to cool down.

On that note: those cottages at the North Pole and Lapland must be vacation homes, because it turns out Santas natural habitat is actually in the southwest corner of the Orion Nebula.

See him there? With his little hat on?

What youre looking at is a massive cloud of incredibly hot gas that was formed after the wind from a star forty times the mass of our own sun smashed violently into the dense gas that surrounded it. It was discovered in 2007, less than a month before Christmas an early present for astronomers, as the press release from the European Space Agency said at the time.

The Orion Nebula isnt the only festive part of the night sky. Santas shadow can be seen in the Tarantula Nebula creepy crawlies need presents too, we suppose:

This is clearly the great mans face here in the nebula IC 2118 yes, we know its technically known as the Witch Head Nebula but look at that gigantic space face and tell us thats not a wispy beard on the chin.

Archaeology

You know, Santa wasnt always Santa. He used to be just a regular Joe Schmo from a town which is called Demre now but used to be called Myra, in what is now Turkey.

He may have been born around 1,700 years ago, but we have more than just centuries-old stories to support his existence. Thanks to the morbid traditions of the Orthodox and Catholic churches, there are quite a few bits of bodies around the world that people claim tohave come from the real-life Saint Nick, but one of them a piece of pelvis found in a Catholic church in Illinois may be the real deal.

Many relics that we study turn out to date to a period somewhat later than the historic attestation would suggest, said archaeological scientist Tom Higham back in 2017. This bone fragment, in contrast, suggests that we could possibly be looking at remains from St Nicholas himself.

Now, you might point out that having his skeleton living in a church on the outskirts of Chicago is more an argument against Santas existence, but consider this: nearly half a million hip replacements are performed every year in the United States alone, and most are on people aged 60 plus. Saint Nick, according to tradition, is over 1,750 years old so its not surprising in the least that the old fella might have had a bit of pelvis removed at some point.

Philosophy

Okay, so you still dont believe us. Thats fine. Lets consider the alternative.

If Santa doesnt exist, that means theres a huge conspiracy thats being willfully upheld by billions of people across the globe. Parents lying to their children; hundreds of movies being made about the same imaginary man; heck, even NORAD is engaged in this gigantic lie surrounding a jolly fat man who gives presents on Christmas. Which, when you put it like that, isnt even that unbelievable a premise.

And to what end? All good conspiracies have an end goal the CIA didnt pretend vampires were real just for fun, after all, they did it to stop the commies. What would be the point of postal workers across the world accepting mail to a mythical person (and sometimes even delivering replies); what gain would researchers and news organizations get for controverting their scientific and journalistic ethics every year?

This is where the philosophical principle known as Ockhams Razor comes into play. In simple terms, this is the idea that we shouldnt make things more complicated than they need to be to explain something. For instance: you flip the light switch, and the light turns on. Whats more likely to be true: that you flipping the switch turned it on, or that you flipping the switch set off a small alarm inside the wall, waking up a dormouse who runs up to the ceiling and opens a tiny chemistry lab, dons a tiny white coat, and starts mixing luminol with various substances which he then funnels down into the bulb in the light, thus illuminating the room?

So with that in mind, we ask you: whats more likely? That the whole world is engaged in a deception?

Or that Santa is, as we promised, real?

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Five Undeniable Scientific Proofs That Santa Is Definitely Real - IFLScience