What happens if you fold a paper 50 times?
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What happens if you fold a paper 50 times?
Suppose that you start with an standard A4 sheet of paper – about 300 mm long, and about 0.05 mm thick. In fact, if you had a sheet of paper, and folded it in half 50 times, how thick would it be? The answer is about 100 million kilometres, which is about two thirds of the distance between the Sun and the Earth.
What happens when you try to fold a piece of paper in half 8 times?
“The first time you fold it in half, it becomes 150 mm long and 0.1 mm thick. The second fold takes it to 75 mm long and 0.2 mm thick. By the eighth fold (if you can get there), you have a blob of paper 1.25 mm long, but 12.8 mm thick. 30 folds will get you to space, because your paper will be now 100 km high.
Why did you think it wouldn’t be that hard to fold a piece of paper in half eight times?
The commonly accepted wisdom is that you can’t fold a single sheet of paper in half more than seven times. The problem with folding paper in half multiple times is that the paper’s surface area decreases by half with each fold.
Is it possible to fold a paper 8 times?
Trying to fold an ordinary sheet of A4 paper suggests that even eight times is impossible: the number of layers doubles each time, and the paper rapidly gets too thick and too small to fold. Such ‘geometric growth’ effects are dramatic: in theory, 26 folds would make the paper thicker than the height of Mount Everest.
What if you could fold a paper 100 times?
With just over 100 folds, the thickness of the paper would be equal to 93 billion light-years. The reason for this is exponential growth. When you perfectly fold the paper in half, you will double its thickness. Folding the paper in half a third time will get you about the thickness of a nail.
What if you fold a piece of paper 103 times?
If you fold an A4 sheet of paper 103 times its thickness will roughly be the size of the Universe. Turns out, according to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, if you do this 103 times the sheet’s thickness will be larger than the observable Universe: 93 billion light-years.