I remember watching this episode back when it aired on tellie. Loved it, and I went around for days challenging friends and family to fold pieces of paper ten times over. Watching it again now really brought back some great memories, and put a big cheesy grin on my face.
For tissue paper 1/100th of a mm thick (1×10¯⁵ m), you would need to double that thickness only 54 times (log(150×10⁹⁺⁵)/log(2)) to reach 150 million km! Great segment.
@@Bibibosh If you take a piece of paper .25 mm thick and fold it in half 100 times, the stack will be larger than the visible universe: About 16.7 BILLION *light years* tall.
Haha I loved the “What is it” segment. I wish I was alive to watch these shows growing up. These guys are my favorite science explainers, even as an adult. Bill Nye was a close second as a kid.
Funny thing as soon as I saw the What Is It part, I knew it was short animal fur since I've studied what it looks like in order to paint fur convincingly. Otherwise, I might not have.
I remember watching Rob and Deane on the Curiosity show after school every day when I was growing up. I absolutely loved that show as well as the short cameo appearances that he did on Hey, hey it's Saturday. The memories take me back. Wonderful stuff. I'm now a subscriber.
Thanks. Curiosity Show was a national science program featuring Dr Rob Morrison and Dr Deane Hutton. It was made in Adelaide, South Australia and screened nationally in Australia as well as in Europe, Asia and Australasia (14 countries and dubbed in German for Europe) from 1972-1990. Deane and Rob intentionally used everyday items around the house (like old rusty cans) so that people could repeat the demonstrations with materials they had to hand. In 1984 Curiosity Show won the Prix Jeunesse International, the world's top award for TV programs for young people. Rob and Deane are steadily uploading segments at th-cam.com/users/curiosityshow Why not subscribe?
Taking distance between earth and sun as d = 1.496 × 10^11 m and height of the paper as h = 1/100 mm = 10^-5 m. Initially height of the paper will be h then 2h then 4h and so on until it is equal to d This forms a gp series with first term = a = h, constant ratio r = 2 and nth term Tn = d So, no. of terms n in the above gp series can be given by the equation ar^(n-1) = Tn Therefore n = log2(1.496×10^16) + 1 = 54.731 So number of folds will be equal to 54.731 - 1 = 53.731 which approximately is equal to 54 times.
That tissue paper is thinner than the 'football field size parachute paper' mythbusters used. And also the tissue paper can leak air. Mythbusters did folded it, 11 times actually, using steamroll..🤣
Mythbusters actually proved that you CAN get more folds if you double the initial size of the paper. So theoretically, you have a limitless amount of folds if you can simply make the paper larger.
I've done the math a couple times and the moon was long gone at 48 and that's assuming he unnecessarily said over when saying "double it over 48 times" and not meaning "double it, over 48 times". 2^(48)/100,000,000=2,814,749 and change (100,000,000X0.01MM=1KM). i even felt stupid like my math was incorrect so i legitimately hit 0.01X2 and the equal sign 48 times, then divided by 10(CM), then 100(MM), then 1000(KM) for the same result. 45 times would get you just short at 351,843. the other person already gave the correct answer of 54. 2^(54)/100,000,000=180,143,985
48 folds to moon is incorrect using their stated 0.01 mm paper thickness. The correct answer is 45.1 folds. Back calculating shows they used a paper thickness of 0.001 mm to arrive at 48 folds. The 384,000 km to moon is correct. The thinnest paper around is 0.02 mm, double their stated thickness, and nowhere close to 0.001 mm needed to arrive at 48 folds.
I notice that Deane was always happy to play the "straight man" to Rob in these experiments. Perhaps Rob's goatee made him look a tad more intellectual and therefore he got to be the smart one. I am loving these Curiosity Show uploads so much.
Some old idiot tried this trick on me except he left out a very important word "half". Of course I won his five because anyone can fold a piece of paper ten times
Next time try one back on him: tell him you can prove 4 - 1 = 5. Take a piece of paper with 4 corners and fold or even better cut one off. You now have 5 corners, 4 - 1 = 5.
The recognised world record (for he number of complete folds in a single piece of paper) is actually 12 folds and was done with a 1.2k long sheet of tissue paper which was then folded length ways 12 times
@AndrewWithEase11 11 sure bro, whatever, insulting me isn’t gonna make ur story any more believable. U do realise that a 0.1mm thick piece of paper (basically the thinnest tissue paper), folded in half 20 times will be 104,857mm thick or ~105 meters thick? So that would be ~52.5 meters thick at 19 folds and so in order to fold it again it would need to be over 2x as long (I can’t really remember how much longer, I think it may have been 4x, but I’m not sure) so likely over a hundred meters and as the length will double for every fold you undo, that will be an insanely long piece of paper to start with. Now do you realise why I don’t believe you? If a group of highschool students could only fold a 1.2km long piece of tissue paper 12 times, I very highly doubt that you with some water, even with a hydraulic press, could fold paper 20 times. But sure, if you wanna claim that you have, go ahead.
@AndrewWithEase11 11 I will point out that the same student was able to get 12 folds with a much smaller piece of gold foil (4” by 4”), she was able to do this because the gold foil is incredibly thin. So if you had a 0.12 micron thick sheet of gold foil (0.00012 mm) and you were rich enough to have a massive sheet of it, you could easily beat 12 folds. But with paper, you aren’t gonna beat 12 folds unless you name ot get your hands on a sheet of paper over 2.4km long and 0.1mm thick and manage to fold it 13 times.
@SumTingFishy you really live up to the name of your profile lol xD Anyone makes a claim thats too good to be true, you destroy them with facts. Amazing stuff
I didn't have access to this show as a kid but I remember reading about this and testing it. At the beginning, I thought they were gonna pull a wise guy: "Fold it in half 10 times? Okay! (folds and unfolds) 1. (folds and unfolds) 2..."
For more than thirty years, it has bothered me that this limit on folding paper is real, that nobody has given me a good explanation of it, and that nobody has named a material that can be folded in half that many times. Also, the Australian form, "in halves", is more logical and consistent.
Each time you fold it in half, you’re doubling the number of layers of paper that you’re trying to fold. After 9 successful folds, you have 512 layers of paper. You’re basically trying to fold a ream of paper that’s the size of a postage stamp. Mythbusters showed that if you start with a large enough sheet of paper (like 20 feet on a side or something ridiculous) you could fold it more than 10 times, but not much more.
@@johnbode5528 , the exponential increase is a good point. It's interesting to learn that someone else reached a limit of "more than 10": my recollection from childhood is of a large sheet of thin paper and just barely getting to eleven folds.
@@johnbode5528 , thinking more about it for a moment just now, I realize that the limit comes from a combination of factors: (1) the number of resulting layers (2) the ratio between the thickness of the paper and its area (3) the stiffness of the folded edges and the fact that the challenge is to make each new fold perpendicular to the one just before it (4) human strength. It is easy enough to fold in half a thousand-page (500-leaf) phonebook, if the axis of the folding is perpendicular to the spine. This is partly because you're not trying to fold the spine, not trying to make it half as long. It's also because the paper of a phonebook is thin enough that the resulting stack of pages is not *terribly* thick-and the pages are wide enough, in relation to the thickness of this stack and its rigidity, you can get enough leverage to use your hands to achieve the fold. The required alternation between horizontal and vertical folds is a big part. It's easy to put dozens of folds into a piece of paper if most of them are parallel to one another and only a few are perpendicular to the first parallel set: witness the folding of a typical paper map! And I bet that a strong enough machine could force more alternating horizontal and vertical folds. Maybe a machine strong enough to counter the resistance of the paper would end up tearing the paper. And I wonder whether one can go further with fabric, whose fibers can be much longer than those of paper.
Someone once wrote an entire paper on this very topic and put forth a mathematical proof on how to achieve more possible folds than what has always been considered an absolute limit and then demonstrated such taking the record for most folds in a piece of paper. Sorry my memory doesn't serve to offer any more details but I did want anyone still reading these comments to know there is a woman somewhere out there that took her math seriously and this paper folding even more so with an astonishing payoff!
Unfortunately this is now out of date. An American maths student worked out formulae for linear and bi-directional folding and in 2002 entered the Guinness Book of Records with 12 folds using 4,000 feet of tissue paper.
Late to the party, I know! There's 2 different things going on here. I guess the folding thing becomes impossible due to the sheer number of sheets being folded and maybe the much longer length of paper needed on the outside of the fold than the inside. But the height of the pile could be better illustrated by cutting the pile in half each time and stacking the two halves on top of each other. Only 48 cuts to reach the moon starting with very thin paper - difficult to imagine. And (I can't be bothered to calculate it) if the final column to the moon was 1cm squared in cross section, how big would the piece of paper have been at the start? (Brain explodes.)
In order to end up with a column of paper that reaches the moon with a cross section 1cm x 1cm, you would need to start with a square piece of paper that is 167.77 km on each side. That is a little larger than the size of Massachusetts. Every two times you fold your square you end up with another square that has sides half the length of the previous. So the starting size is 2^24 cm. In order to reach the Sun (54 folds), you would need a piece that is 2^27 cm x 2^27 cm. That's about the size of Alaska.
That's more like the version of this puzzle that I'm familiar with. How many times can you tear a paper in half, stack it, halve it, stack it, etc. 7 times max.
Well…He did get to nine folds by using progressively larger and thinner sheets….so to get his ten, he might have done it with just one more attempt using a very large sheet of especially thin paper. So near but so far.
@Atheist Dingo Sure it does! The exercise states "you can't fold a piece of paper more than ten times". It doesn't say "you can't fold a piece of paper more than ten times, and you're not allowed to use any tools, and the paper has to be small, and the paper has to be very thick, etc etc." If you like, we could stack on more and more restrictions until the exercise is altogether impossible!
Obviously the thickness plays quite a part in the ability to fold a sheet 10 times, you could see clearly he was getting an extra fold in with each thickness decrease. Id say if he went with something exceptionally thinner, I don't think you'll need to do much math to figure out that 10 folds will obviously be a sinch.
Right?!? Like the sheet of gold on the James Webb Space Telescope. I think the sheet is like 1 micron thick or something crazy. Basically a golf ball size ball of gold covering a tennis court.
It’s not impossible to fold it 10 times, it’s completely subjective to how big the paper is compared to how thin it is. They did increase the size and decrease the thickness, but it’s not possible when it’s only the size of your table. For example, if you had a football field sized piece of tissue paper about 1/100th of a mm thick at about 91.44m X 48.8m, theoretically you can fold it 11 times with a thickness of only 20.48 mm. The world record for most folds is actually 12. Now realistically this isn’t practical or easy to get a football field sized piece of tissue paper so this myth is better as a bar trick
Chuck Norris folded a piece of paper 48 times, walked onto the moon, and round-house kicked a meteor so hard it went through time and space to kill the dinosaurs
I tried the same with a friend of mine for money, and he also wasn't able to fold 10 times - actually he didn't even fold the coin once.
This comment is gold (no pun intended if the coin was a canadian dollar).
Best comments ever in the history of Humankind.
Fucking take my thumbs up, I genuinely laughed out loud.
This is my kinda joke 😂
You’ve won the internet!!!! Brilliant 😂😂😂😂
This is actually how they got to the moon, they simply folded a large paper 48 times while a spaceship was sitting on top
Haha. Lets figure that out for Mars.
THAT part wasn't faked.
more believable than nasa
SHHHHHH!!! You know you could be killed for releasing that information! Next time you drive your car check the brakes!
🤣
I actually did this 10 folds when I was a kid. My universe imploded upon itself and I ended up in this reality. I miss the purple skies.
A friend of mine did this in school, but forgot to say "in half," first. I folded it ten times, but not in half. He wasnt happy
That's a good way to get slapped
@@Jeremy.Bearemy Lol. He learned a good lesson on wording that day.
Roasted! 🔥🔥
But made no attempt to stop you and clarify?
@@gnamp Not really. I don't remember why
I remember watching this episode back when it aired on tellie. Loved it, and I went around for days challenging friends and family to fold pieces of paper ten times over. Watching it again now really brought back some great memories, and put a big cheesy grin on my face.
Mate, watched it too, and I am still trying figure out how many I need to reach the moon hahah
Lmao. You brits and your "tellie" (tubbies)
Can you tell how old is that show is
@@kapa8514 Yes I can, I was about eight or nine when this episode aired. I'm 53 now. So, about 45 years ago.
@@HingleCringle Australia, mate.
The more you fould a paper in half, the more you realize paper is just very thin wood.
- Mr Myagi
For tissue paper 1/100th of a mm thick (1×10¯⁵ m), you would need to double that thickness only 54 times (log(150×10⁹⁺⁵)/log(2)) to reach 150 million km! Great segment.
Binary Agenda moon.. 48times..
sun 54 times....
@@Bibibosh If you take a piece of paper .25 mm thick and fold it in half 100 times, the stack will be larger than the visible universe: About 16.7 BILLION *light years* tall.
JustWasted3HoursHere ..... is that where buzz lightyear lives?
@@Bibibosh Actually, he's from the Gamma Quadrant, Sector 4. :)
Binary Agenda: come on don't bullshit me.
"You'll notice I'm pressing it flat!"
"Ah, it's wonderful to see."
The best duo ever
We need these sort of shows for this generation of kids.
They did that on myth busters… j/s we got it.. slow down grandpa
@@christopheranton9258 it's cancelled
I watched a lot of backyard science in 2000s
@@christopheranton9258 Who needs scientists when we have reality show actors. 😂😂😂
@@O-.-O define scientist, homie... looks to me like the dudes at mythbusters would fit that description...
Enjoyed it. Sort of the reverse of the doubling rice grain puzzle. Thanks for posting and looking forward to the next videos! You guys rock!!
Many thanks - please spread the word - we are after 100,000 subscribers so we can start something new - Rob
Persian Chessboard
@@CuriosityShow 49 actually!
@@CuriosityShow you did it
yes of course
This is just such a pure and enjoyable show.
Haha I loved the “What is it” segment. I wish I was alive to watch these shows growing up. These guys are my favorite science explainers, even as an adult. Bill Nye was a close second as a kid.
Very kind of you, and keep subscribed at th-cam.com/users/curiosityshow for new stuff each week - Rob
Funny thing as soon as I saw the What Is It part, I knew it was short animal fur since I've studied what it looks like in order to paint fur convincingly. Otherwise, I might not have.
I was like
Is that a cat
Bill Nye is now a woke soy boy teaching kids that there’s no biology behind gender 🤷🏼♀️
@@djberryhardkore Maybe listen to him then. He’s a smart man.
I remember watching Rob and Deane on the Curiosity show after school every day when I was growing up. I absolutely loved that show as well as the short cameo appearances that he did on Hey, hey it's Saturday. The memories take me back. Wonderful stuff. I'm now a subscriber.
I want to go back in time and tell these guys how much I enjoyed watching the show on my smart phone.
The best show from Australia that I watched in the 90s on Austria
This was like the best show ever as a kid. I'm now 50 and just found this.
I don't have to wait a week for more curiosity show!
Back then as kids we did, and week seemed like a year ^^
Uphill both ways too? In the snow
When did this show aired?
@@kingsly1031 sometime between 1972-1990.
@@kingsly1031 I was watching it as a kid in the early 80s... the show ran from 1972 to 1990
This explains the disastrous Australian moon mission in 1973.
I love how these videos are starting to get TH-cam recommended again. Even though the videos are short and sciencey.
i dont know why i was recommended this or why i watched it all the way through but i loved every bit of it
they both are genius, thanks for uploading on YT. I never saw this show before.
I remember mythbusters were able to fold a big paper
I don't know exactly how old this show is, but it is still interesting. 💯
Thanks. Curiosity Show was a national science program featuring Dr Rob Morrison and Dr Deane Hutton. It was made in Adelaide, South Australia and screened nationally in Australia as well as in Europe, Asia and Australasia (14 countries and dubbed in German for Europe) from 1972-1990. Deane and Rob intentionally used everyday items around the house (like old rusty cans) so that people could repeat the demonstrations with materials they had to hand. In 1984 Curiosity Show won the Prix Jeunesse International, the world's top award for TV programs for young people. Rob and Deane are steadily uploading segments at th-cam.com/users/curiosityshow Why not subscribe?
These shows were the internet of the time! And they were glorious!!!!
the "what is it" part made it all worth it; cute pupper.
To build a space elevator to the Moon:
• get tissue paper
• fold in half 48 times
• ???
• profit
problem??
uh the bible paper is thinner that tissue paper
@@fruitguy7731 who will do the unthinkable
• buy a big bag for all the money
Forget the Moon, Elon will just fold his paper 200 times!
FINALLY,
An easy solution for travelling to moon
It's actually a magic show with the magician pulling out any type of paper asked for. Bravo.
Such an epic show growing up!! I still remember the visit to my primary school... i loved the liquid nitrogen with lettuce ( and other fruit/veg )
This th-cam.com/video/wtbcaWnybzs/w-d-xo.html
i remember the conclusion always and think how amazing it is
The amazing part is he already had the other papers ready. Like he knew....
And cameras to film it. It's almost as if this entire charade was intended as some kind of... broadcast. Sus as hell if you ask me.
I love this channel, it's so wholesome
I watched this original episode when I was a kid and was amazed. Never forgot it.
Taking distance between earth and sun as d = 1.496 × 10^11 m and height of the paper as h = 1/100 mm = 10^-5 m.
Initially height of the paper will be h then 2h then 4h and so on until it is equal to d
This forms a gp series with first term = a = h, constant ratio r = 2 and nth term Tn = d
So, no. of terms n in the above gp series can be given by the equation ar^(n-1) = Tn
Therefore n = log2(1.496×10^16) + 1 = 54.731
So number of folds will be equal to 54.731 - 1 = 53.731 which approximately is equal to 54 times.
thanks :o i guessed 55
Hmmm yes yes ofcourse, yes 54
Congratulations on trying to explain to somebody like me that cannot fathom this.
Saw this topic on Mythbusters and they concluded it could only be folded 8 times, but just shown here with tissue paper, 9 times.
That tissue paper is thinner than the 'football field size parachute paper' mythbusters used.
And also the tissue paper can leak air.
Mythbusters did folded it, 11 times actually, using steamroll..🤣
Mythbusters actually proved that you CAN get more folds if you double the initial size of the paper. So theoretically, you have a limitless amount of folds if you can simply make the paper larger.
@@drewgwins6073 i think we were watching different episodes. i recall that it didn't matter the size. i might have to watch again.
Yeah saw that too, was kinda surprised he hit 9 folds no trouble
th-cam.com/video/65Qzc3_NtGs/w-d-xo.html
Here's 10+ folds. Friends and fork lift assisted.
this video has saved many lives.
This is how we can actually get to moon, we simply need to fold a large paper 10 times while a people's sitting on top of it.
The myth busters did this with a huge tarp. I don't remember but I think they were able to fold it 10 or 11 times. Pretty cool regardless.
Yeah they did it 11 times
This is actually Australia’s best scientific minds
They're still working on it today...
"We'll see you next week, goodbye"
*They did not see me the next week*
love the transition with the dog! so cute
I can't even fold an Australian dollar once!
Siren Hound Nice one!
Government spoils all of our fun! :-)
Oh, is it because they are made out of plastic?
@@ABW941 Our one and two dollar notes were replaced by coins. Interesting fact: The Australian two dollar coin is smaller than the one dollar coin.
@@gorillaau Our 50 Eurocent are larger than our 1 Euro coin.
I've done the math a couple times and the moon was long gone at 48 and that's assuming he unnecessarily said over when saying "double it over 48 times" and not meaning "double it, over 48 times". 2^(48)/100,000,000=2,814,749 and change (100,000,000X0.01MM=1KM). i even felt stupid like my math was incorrect so i legitimately hit 0.01X2 and the equal sign 48 times, then divided by 10(CM), then 100(MM), then 1000(KM) for the same result. 45 times would get you just short at 351,843. the other person already gave the correct answer of 54. 2^(54)/100,000,000=180,143,985
54 to the sun or what? Because that would've actually been my guess!
@@ggdk2865 yes, 54 is past the sun
48 folds to moon is incorrect using their stated 0.01 mm paper thickness. The correct answer is 45.1 folds. Back calculating shows they used a paper thickness of 0.001 mm to arrive at 48 folds. The 384,000 km to moon is correct. The thinnest paper around is 0.02 mm, double their stated thickness, and nowhere close to 0.001 mm needed to arrive at 48 folds.
@@sarz24241 that's what i said, 45 folds would be just short.
I notice that Deane was always happy to play the "straight man" to Rob in these experiments. Perhaps Rob's goatee made him look a tad more intellectual and therefore he got to be the smart one. I am loving these Curiosity Show uploads so much.
We took it in turns to be straight or active person in these things - Rob
The POWER of two!!!!
Some old idiot tried this trick on me except he left out a very important word "half". Of course I won his five because anyone can fold a piece of paper ten times
Hilarious. 😂
Next time try one back on him: tell him you can prove 4 - 1 = 5. Take a piece of paper with 4 corners and fold or even better cut one off. You now have 5 corners, 4 - 1 = 5.
Was a mirror involved when you did the trick?
I've tried the same once with a friend of mine. We didn't even get to one as he was already complaining about the strain on his back.
What a great show this was back in the day 🤙
I was talking about folding paper just 10 minutes ago and now this got recommended out of the blue.
The recognised world record (for he number of complete folds in a single piece of paper) is actually 12 folds and was done with a 1.2k long sheet of tissue paper which was then folded length ways 12 times
@AndrewWithEase11 11 sure dude. Ofc you did.
@AndrewWithEase11 11 sure bro, whatever, insulting me isn’t gonna make ur story any more believable. U do realise that a 0.1mm thick piece of paper (basically the thinnest tissue paper), folded in half 20 times will be 104,857mm thick or ~105 meters thick? So that would be ~52.5 meters thick at 19 folds and so in order to fold it again it would need to be over 2x as long (I can’t really remember how much longer, I think it may have been 4x, but I’m not sure) so likely over a hundred meters and as the length will double for every fold you undo, that will be an insanely long piece of paper to start with. Now do you realise why I don’t believe you? If a group of highschool students could only fold a 1.2km long piece of tissue paper 12 times, I very highly doubt that you with some water, even with a hydraulic press, could fold paper 20 times. But sure, if you wanna claim that you have, go ahead.
@AndrewWithEase11 11 I will point out that the same student was able to get 12 folds with a much smaller piece of gold foil (4” by 4”), she was able to do this because the gold foil is incredibly thin. So if you had a 0.12 micron thick sheet of gold foil (0.00012 mm) and you were rich enough to have a massive sheet of it, you could easily beat 12 folds. But with paper, you aren’t gonna beat 12 folds unless you name ot get your hands on a sheet of paper over 2.4km long and 0.1mm thick and manage to fold it 13 times.
@SumTingFishy you really live up to the name of your profile lol xD Anyone makes a claim thats too good to be true, you destroy them with facts. Amazing stuff
@@larajanesen8795 lol thanks
I didn't have access to this show as a kid but I remember reading about this and testing it. At the beginning, I thought they were gonna pull a wise guy: "Fold it in half 10 times? Okay! (folds and unfolds) 1. (folds and unfolds) 2..."
You were a smart kid 😁
BRILLIANT !
Thank you this is a very old thinking problem that has been shown in a slightly different light
"If you can cover the whole world with your arms, then your arms will be extremely huge and long".
What a show this was! Engaging intelligent and always intriguing! Don't make em like that anymore!
sheet thickness * 2^#folds = distance
1×10^-5 m * 2^54 = 180,143,985,095 metres (180 million km). Sun is approx. 150 million km away.
I've obsessed over the "fan fold" in the past and that's the first thing I thought of for doing the "fold in half ten times" bit
I like how they randomly have everything they need
The Mythbusters folded a plane hanger sized piece of paper more than 10 times (they needed a forklift to do some of it).
Freal?
Yup!
With a large enough piece of paper, you could get to 11 as shown by mythbusters
Wasn't it the size of a tennis court??
@@geoninja8971 bigger I think, they had to do it in a hangar. Just search mythbusters paper fold.
I knew it was a dog straight away,
I'm too clever for this programme
For more than thirty years, it has bothered me that this limit on folding paper is real, that nobody has given me a good explanation of it, and that nobody has named a material that can be folded in half that many times.
Also, the Australian form, "in halves", is more logical and consistent.
Each time you fold it in half, you’re doubling the number of layers of paper that you’re trying to fold.
After 9 successful folds, you have 512 layers of paper. You’re basically trying to fold a ream of paper that’s the size of a postage stamp. Mythbusters showed that if you start with a large enough sheet of paper (like 20 feet on a side or something ridiculous) you could fold it more than 10 times, but not much more.
@@johnbode5528 , the exponential increase is a good point. It's interesting to learn that someone else reached a limit of "more than 10": my recollection from childhood is of a large sheet of thin paper and just barely getting to eleven folds.
@@johnbode5528 , thinking more about it for a moment just now, I realize that the limit comes from a combination of factors:
(1) the number of resulting layers
(2) the ratio between the thickness of the paper and its area
(3) the stiffness of the folded edges and the fact that the challenge is to make each new fold perpendicular to the one just before it
(4) human strength.
It is easy enough to fold in half a thousand-page (500-leaf) phonebook, if the axis of the folding is perpendicular to the spine. This is partly because you're not trying to fold the spine, not trying to make it half as long. It's also because the paper of a phonebook is thin enough that the resulting stack of pages is not *terribly* thick-and the pages are wide enough, in relation to the thickness of this stack and its rigidity, you can get enough leverage to use your hands to achieve the fold.
The required alternation between horizontal and vertical folds is a big part. It's easy to put dozens of folds into a piece of paper if most of them are parallel to one another and only a few are perpendicular to the first parallel set: witness the folding of a typical paper map!
And I bet that a strong enough machine could force more alternating horizontal and vertical folds. Maybe a machine strong enough to counter the resistance of the paper would end up tearing the paper.
And I wonder whether one can go further with fabric, whose fibers can be much longer than those of paper.
Someone once wrote an entire paper on this very topic and put forth a mathematical proof on how to achieve more possible folds than what has always been considered an absolute limit and then demonstrated such taking the record for most folds in a piece of paper.
Sorry my memory doesn't serve to offer any more details but I did want anyone still reading these comments to know there is a woman somewhere out there that took her math seriously and this paper folding even more so with an astonishing payoff!
@@kylejohnson150 Her name was Britney Gallivan if you want to read about her again.
Unfortunately this is now out of date. An American maths student worked out formulae for linear and bi-directional folding and in 2002 entered the Guinness Book of Records with 12 folds using 4,000 feet of tissue paper.
How long did it take him to fold paper that long?
@@jgt_ I don't think Jude's question was whether it was a her or a him.
@@jgt_ From your lack luster answer it sounds like you were :)
@@jgt_ lol lacklustre
@@rattiusr6418 L
Lol they perfectly understood their format!. Good byen!
They should do more of this - that’s more education that the BS on TV now lol
Late to the party, I know! There's 2 different things going on here. I guess the folding thing becomes impossible due to the sheer number of sheets being folded and maybe the much longer length of paper needed on the outside of the fold than the inside. But the height of the pile could be better illustrated by cutting the pile in half each time and stacking the two halves on top of each other. Only 48 cuts to reach the moon starting with very thin paper - difficult to imagine. And (I can't be bothered to calculate it) if the final column to the moon was 1cm squared in cross section, how big would the piece of paper have been at the start? (Brain explodes.)
Very large indeed, needs to have enough mass to cover for the whole trip. But nobody said the original paper had to have a certain size.
In order to end up with a column of paper that reaches the moon with a cross section 1cm x 1cm, you would need to start with a square piece of paper that is 167.77 km on each side. That is a little larger than the size of Massachusetts. Every two times you fold your square you end up with another square that has sides half the length of the previous. So the starting size is 2^24 cm.
In order to reach the Sun (54 folds), you would need a piece that is 2^27 cm x 2^27 cm. That's about the size of Alaska.
@@SergioCastillo87 the first
That's more like the version of this puzzle that I'm familiar with. How many times can you tear a paper in half, stack it, halve it, stack it, etc. 7 times max.
@@vendingdudes I've honestly never heard of that variation before. Only the folding one
I would of folded it once then
Unfolded it and repeated That
Nine More Times.
I folded it ten times ✌🥺👌
This is fun one. I still sometimes think I can do it. Fun watching my kids try. Lol
I love the little Who's That Pokemon segment
Mythbusters managed this but it took all sorts of heavy machinery to do it. edit: th-cam.com/video/kRAEBbotuIE/w-d-xo.html they did it to 11 folds.
The Best Stooge they didn’t do it 48 times.
@RDV RDV Took them a HUGE piece to start with as well. No human hands can do it.
Also special paper
I thought they only folded it 8 times though? Not 10... never mind, just watched it, they did 11
@schr4nz th-cam.com/video/kRAEBbotuIE/w-d-xo.html they did it to 11.
Was that your dog Deane or Rob??
Neither. I suspect it belonged to our producer of the time, Ian, who had two boxers - Rob
This makes me weirdly nostalgic for that Australian childhood I never lived because I grew up in California.
Ahhhhh holy crappers... I used to watch their show every afternoon when I was a kid.
back when you had cool shows to learn from not
"tommy has two mommies" or "suzy thinks she's a boy"
Can someone send me money so I can try?
Give your address. I'm sending you a coin!
Love the outro. Tunes!
These guys know star distances really well
no they don't 😄
Well…He did get to nine folds by using progressively larger and thinner sheets….so to get his ten, he might have done it with just one more attempt using a very large sheet of especially thin paper. So near but so far.
I believe myth busters were able to fold a piece of paper thirteen times
@Atheist Dingo still counts!
However, this was done in the 80s, when did Mythbusters push the envelope to reach their goal?
@Atheist Dingo Sure it does! The exercise states "you can't fold a piece of paper more than ten times". It doesn't say "you can't fold a piece of paper more than ten times, and you're not allowed to use any tools, and the paper has to be small, and the paper has to be very thick, etc etc." If you like, we could stack on more and more restrictions until the exercise is altogether impossible!
@@Maninawig I'll Grant you it took place many years later. Nevertheless, it has been done
Then they'd get that giant paper, but not his dollar!
Myth busters was able to get more than 10 folds, but the paper was like the size of a small warehouse.
Damn... at the start I honestly thought that dog was a pig!
Obviously the thickness plays quite a part in the ability to fold a sheet 10 times, you could see clearly he was getting an extra fold in with each thickness decrease. Id say if he went with something exceptionally thinner, I don't think you'll need to do much math to figure out that 10 folds will obviously be a sinch.
There’s a Mythbusters on that, isn’t there?
@@theKobus yes and when a giant piece
Right?!? Like the sheet of gold on the James Webb Space Telescope. I think the sheet is like 1 micron thick or something crazy. Basically a golf ball size ball of gold covering a tennis court.
@@MagicScorpio some girl got 12 folds by using a a bunch of tissue paper a decade ago. Imagine if she had the telescope gold foil.
He doesn’t need to go thinner, just bigger
It’s not impossible to fold it 10 times, it’s completely subjective to how big the paper is compared to how thin it is. They did increase the size and decrease the thickness, but it’s not possible when it’s only the size of your table. For example, if you had a football field sized piece of tissue paper about 1/100th of a mm thick at about 91.44m X 48.8m, theoretically you can fold it 11 times with a thickness of only 20.48 mm. The world record for most folds is actually 12. Now realistically this isn’t practical or easy to get a football field sized piece of tissue paper so this myth is better as a bar trick
They never stated you could never fold *any* paper 10 times, just the papers he provided.
MythBusters did this as well but I already knew the answer because of these awesome guys.
I don't know how or why this ended up in my recommended videos, but thank you, Algorithm!
The bit with the cat was the best bit
Chuck Norris folded a piece of paper 48 times, walked onto the moon, and round-house kicked a meteor so hard it went through time and space to kill the dinosaurs
I vaguely remember this episode as a kid.....long time ago now.
Watched the Curiosity Show as my favourite back in the day
these guys work great together
intense article right there - the fold
Aaaahhhhhh, the old Australian dollar note. Nostalgia!
I remember hearing somewhere that no mater how large the paper was you could not fold it over 7 times.
It’s random stuff like this that makes me good at pub quizzes
The Hydraulic Press Channel tried this and it exploded. It pushed the channel to stardom.
These are the guys who would be like, "excellent taping today, yes? Shall we take the wives square dancing?"
I’ve seen this problem before but this vid was so well made. Have a sub
so if you fold a piece of salami 48 times you've basically solved world hunger.
I'm convinced someone at youtube is trolling the world with these random videos.
GREAT MEMORIES! THX ❤❤❤❤❤😊😊
I would have won this bet. He didn't say he couldn't unfold and refold. Didn't say they all needed to be in a row... But still good educational piece
Omfg I'm having a flash back of being 10 years old. This show was great.