Friday, May 25, 2007

A CURIOSITY

If you fold a piece of paper down the middle doing it smaller, you will arrive in a moment in which you won’t be able to continue.
The other day, I found out that if you can fold 42 times the paper on itself, you would have an equal thickness to the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
If you want to prove it, try it and you will see that difficulty you will obtain to fold the piece of paper down the middle more than seven times. Luckily, you will arrive at eight or nein… but no more. Also, you can choose a big paper (A3…), but you will see!
If you use a thin paper, you will be able to fold it until seven times and, with difficulty, until eight but although it’s very thin, you won’t pass it more.
So, the result is a heavy paper and every time would be bigger if we could do it…
In conclusion, 42 folders would produce as a result a thickness of… 351.000 kilometres, almost equal of the distance of the Moon.
Numerically, if we fold the paper 42 times we would have two elevated in 42 layers or, the same, 4.398.046.511.104 layers. If every layer has a thickness of 0,8 tenth of millimetre, we obtain a thickness of 351.843,72 kilometres.
Incredible but true!!!

Mundial record: Britney Gallivan was able to fold a paper until 12 times.

1 comment:

Barrie said...

Hi Carina, what a curiosity! It is really amazing how many odd things you can find in the world. You would need ten lives to discover all of them.