What is the height of a normal piece of paper folded in half fifty times?

Answer 1

Normal paper is referred to as "16-weight" which is .0032 inches thick. To figure out how thick it would be after fifty folds, you have to know how many layers there would be and multiply that number times .0032

After 1 fold you would have 2 layers, after 2 folds, 4, after 3 folds, 8 etc. In other words you would end up with 2 raised to the 50th power folds. That's 2 times itself 50 times. That's a big number. In fact it comes to a whopping 1125899906842627 layers!!!

Multiply that times .0032 and you find out that the paper would now be 3602879701896.397 inches thick!! Mind you that's not counting the air trapped between layers.

[Interesting to know, though, is that it has been proven that no matter how big a sheet of paper is (length times width) you can only fold it up to 7 times, unless you use a sheet that's the size of a ware house and have five hours and a C.A.T Roller to flatten the paper, in which case you can get up to 11. But under human strength can you only get it to 7, which would make the paper 0032 x 2^7 or 0.4096 inches thick. Quite a difference.]

P.S. The world record is 12 times

wjs1632

Or you could try the correct answer. No matter how many times you fold it, a standard sheet of paper is always 11" tall.

AdditionJust for the record in the UK and probably across Europe the standard size of paper closest to "letter" in the US is called A4 (about 11.7" high). We used to have a size called foolscap (pronounced fullscap) which was even higher but hasn't been seen in offices for a good while.

Correction

A piece paper cannot be folded in half more than 7 times. Its a trick question?

shut up

Complete correction

Britney Gallivan has solved the Paper Folding Problem. she folded a sheet of gold foil 12 times, breaking the record. The exact limit for single direction folding case was derived, based on the accumulative limiting effects induced by every fold in the folding process. Here is Britney's formula : L =((π.t)/6).(2n+4)(2n-1) L is the minimum possible length of the material, t is material thickness, and n is the number of folds possible in one direction. L and t need to be expressed using the same units. By using this formula you can calculate how many times you can fold whatever you want. PS: If you fold a paper of 0,1mm, 40times the thickness will be the distance between the earth and the moon. So do not even try it :)

Answer 2

Discovery channel:

Mythbusters: episode 72:Original airdate: January 24, 2007 "seven folds"

It was impossible to fold a piece of letter-sized (8.5" × 11", 216 mm × 279 mm) 20 lb (75 g/m²) copy paper with perpendicular folds more than seven times. The thickness of the paper grew geometrically with each successive fold, and after the seventh fold the paper was just too thick to fold without breaking. Breaking the rules of the challenge, Grant showed that folding a particularly thin sheet of paper in the same direction 4 times then 4 times the other way, it is possible to fold the paper 8 times. The MythBusters then laid out a football field-sized sheet of interconnected paper (170 ft × 220 ft, 51.8 m × 67.1 m), and due to the reduction of its area-to-thickness ratio (and with help from a steam roller and a forklift), were able to perpendicularly fold the paper 11 times. Other methods of folding a piece of paper (such as with alternating folds) proved able to break the fold threshold of 7 for letter-sized paper, and perpendicular folds of more than 7 are theoretically possible with thinner paper.

Answer 3

An infinite number of times.

The most it has been done, at present is 12 times.

Answer 4

depends on how you fold it...

Answer 5

NO nick it would not reach the moon

Answer 6

8 or 9