It’s almost time for mince pies and presents, but just how does Santa deliver all those gifts around the entire world in just one night?

Well, after a little bit of Santa delivery research, we stumbled across the theory of “wormholes”.

A wormhole is a “theoretical passage through space time” which could create shortcuts through the universe.

The wormhole theory would not only allow Santa to jump from chimney to chimney but to carry out temporal hops too, providing all the time in the world to deliver those presents.

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“Santa wormhole theory essentially postulates a new way for Santa to get around the planet,” says astronomer Stephen Brown.

“Obviously he has a lot of homes to visit and a lot of presents to deliver in quite a short space of time…but if you could jump into a wormhole in one living room and emerge almost instantaneously in another, you could make those deliveries a lot faster.”

Wormholes were first theorised in 1916, though they didn’t go by that name at the time.

Albert Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen then later used the theory of general relativity to elaborate on the idea, proposing the existence of “bridges” through space time.

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The shortcuts came to be called Einstein-Rosen bridges, or wormholes.

Wormholes are a recurring plot line in science fiction, a sort of tunnel that joins distant points in space, or even two universes, via space-time curvature.

Theoretically, such a tunnel could be traversed from one point in space to another without actually travelling the distance between them.

But, they’ve never actually been observed in the universe and, according to astronomer Stephen Brown, there are also a few other tricky problems.

“It would actually be very difficult to create a wormhole and keep it open and not collapse,” says Stephen.

“You would need some potentially exotic matter to keep it open and we don’t really know what we would need in order to that.

“So if Santa does know how to create wormholes and travel through them then he’s sitting on some very interesting physics theories that we’d love to get a hold of.”

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So the answer? We’re afraid we simply don’t know all of Santa’s secrets just yet.

But no matter how he does get down your chimney, we hope you have a well-deserved mince pie waiting for him.

Have a very merry Christmas everyone!