4 ms·
Is there any research on why its so hard to fold the paper ?
by option_greek 7y ago
Is there any research on why its so hard to fold the paper ?
- User23 7y agoIt’s just basic physics and a function of the sheet’s thinkness. Imagine an arbitrarily thick piece of paper such that it’s impossible to fold even once. Then imagine an infinitesimally thin sheet of paper and start folding. Each fold, to a reasonable approximation, doubles the thickness of the paper and it will exponentially approach the unfoldable thickness.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chongli 7y ago2^12 = 4096. So folding a sheet of paper 12 times would result in something 4096 times as thick. If you think about a stack of printer paper nearly 2 inches thick, well that's only 500 sheets. This fold would be more than 8 times that thick.
- ikeyany 7y ago4096x is the theoretical lower bound, assuming perfect folding and compression.
- scarejunba 7y agoWell, if you do it some 30 times you'd have a stack to the moon so that may help understand.
- pulisse 7y agoYes, the research was first done by the high school student mentioned in TFA, who, for a class project, developed a model to justify the folkloric claim that the maximum number of possible folds was 8. Her model suggested that, contrary to popular belief, 12 folds was possible, so she set out to empirically test that prediction.[0] [0] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Folding.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Folding.html