Limit Numbers Paper For Free

It doesn't explode exactly, it's just too stiff to fold. 7 folds is probably too many, but if you could manage it the paper would be or 128 layers thick; folding again would be like folding a thick paperback book in half, you can't do it.

It's just a matter of math, really. Fold an A4 once and it will be twice as thick, fold it again and it will be four times as thick as it initially was. Turns out, ing 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.

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.

If we fold a piece of paper 42 times, its thickness will actually be equal to the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

The distance between the earth and the moon is around 384,400 kilometers (remember 1 km = 1,000,000 mm). After 42 folds, would the paper reach the moon? (439,804,651,110.4 mm = 439,804.7 km, so yes, it would reach the moon because 439,804.7 > 384,400)

It's commonly accepted that you cannot fold a single sheet of paper in half more than 7 times, no matter what paper finish, size, or basis weight you're using, for two main reasons: Every time you fold your sheet, you reduce your total surface area by half, so eventually you simply run out of surface area to fold.

Using this equation, a standard piece of printer paper has w = 8.5 inches and t = 0.004 inches, so that n = 7. So a standard piece of paper can indeed only be folded seven times. However, if we had an 8.5 x 11 in. sheet of paper that was a quarter as thick as normal, using this equation, we could fold it nine times.