Fold a piece of paper 42 times and you can reach the moon
Thread Content
The thickness of a standard piece of printing paper is 0.088 millimeters; folding it 42 times is equivalent to multiplying by 2 to the power of 42, which equals 387,028 kilometers. It is equivalent to the average distance from Earth to the Moon. Folding it 51 times can take you to the Sun.
If the thickness of the paper reaches half of the folding dimension, it becomes difficult to fold it. From this, it can be inferred that if the paper is square with side length a and thickness h, then after one fold, the folding dimension remains unchanged while the thickness doubles to 2h; after two folds, the folding dimension becomes half of the original side length and the thickness becomes 4h. By continuing this process of folding, a formula can be derived: when the number of folds n is even, the folding dimension is l/(2^(0.5*n)) and the thickness becomes 2^n*h. Folding becomes impossible when n > 2/3*(log2(l/h) – 1). Based on the typical properties of paper, with a thickness of around 0.1 mm and a side length of 1 m, using the formula above, it can be determined that folding is not possible when n > 8.1918; this means that for a square piece of paper with a thickness of about 0.1 mm and a side length of 1 m, only 8 folds are possible. Considering a larger sheet with the same thickness but a side length of 1 Km, using the formula above, it can be determined that when n>14.8357, folding is not possible; thus, only 14 folds can be made. Therefore, the number of times it can be folded is related to the value of l/h; if l/h is infinite, its logarithm is also infinite, and consequently the number of times it can be folded is also infinite. Of course, these are all conclusions drawn theoretically; as for whether a sheet of paper this large can be folded and how it can be folded, that cannot be proven.
It is said that you cannot fold any A4 sheet more than 7 times!
Well, this method is great! In the future, let’s all fold paper while going to the moon; P
It seems the Guinness record for folding a single sheet of paper is 12 times: lol
No matter how much it’s folded, it can’t be less than the structural distance between atoms or molecules in a substance, right? Unless gravity is so strong that it causes collapse, in which case it becomes a black hole. Haha, it seems quite contradictory