enotalone Home  |  Forum  |  Search    
The Physics of Christmas
From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the Thermodynamics of Turkey
by Roger Highfield
List Price: 16.99
Price: 15.29

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books (November 01 1999)
Costumer Rating: Costumer rating

Read an Excerpt

Santa and Those Reindeer
Where do you think Santa Claus is right now? Sitting with a glass of sherry in front of the glowing embers in a cozy wooden house while Arctic snow falls softly on his sleigh outside? Or maybe feeding the reindeer?

Who Was Santa?
Legend suggests that St. Nicholas was born around A.D. 245 in the town of Patara, an important Byzantine port in Turkey, only a couple of hours' sail from Gemiler. When Nicholas was a young man, his father died, leaving a great fortune.

Modern Santa and Meaning
It would be a mistake to describe today's Santa as a simple amalgam and evolutionary endpoint of his rich mixture of ancestors. For one thing, many versions still exist. In different regions of Germany St. Nick is known by various names


About the Author

Roger HighfieldRoger Highfield

Roger Highfield is the science editor of The Daily Telegraph in London. He carried out research at Oxford University and the Institute Lane Langevin, Grenoble, where he became the first to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He has coauthored three other books: Frontiers of Complexity, The Private Lives of Albert Einstein and The Arrow of Time a bestseller that has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

  » More by Roger Highfield