There was a time when Cecil was a stickler for accuracy in research. My how times have changed. Folding plastic is NOT the same as folding paper. The state of the art of paper making has not yet been able to achieve the ratio of strength to thickness that plastic has. Thus, you can manufacture a .4 mil sheet of plastic that two people can hold in their hands, tug on and wave up and down without tearing. The same cannot be said of paper.
Research has shown that given a piece of paper the proper dimensions, it CAN be folded more than seven times, but not without difficulty.
What makes the legend long-standing is the fact that few people (including Cecil I presume) want to go to the cost and effort to make it happen, and it appears that there is one source of myth busting research that Cecil is reluctant to cite.
I don’t see why you can’t fold a piece of paper a mile on a side (as mentioned in the article), or much smaller, more than seven times, since if I try this with an ordinary piece of paper, it gets too thick to fold again, but only because it also gets smaller (I tried it with an ordinary 8 1/2x11 sheet and managed 6 times, what was left was about an inch square and a quarter inch thick; if it was much larger but the same thickness, it would be easy to fold it more since the area:thickness ratio would be greater, just like the plastic sheet).
No luck needed if the paper is big enough; here is a page that says you can do it many more times, and even has fancy equations you can use to calculate how many times you can fold a piece of paper of a given size; basically, to fold a piece of paper 8 times instead of 7, it has to be four times bigger. It even mentions folding as many as SIXTEEN times:
So I think Cecil is vindicated on this count; as I suspected, the size and thickness of the plastic was a more important factor than the material.
That’s one of those internet “factoids” along with the one about “a duck’s quack does not echo; nobody knows why.” I’ve never done any research, but I don’t feel compelled to do so. If something can make a sound, it can echo. Another “factoid” was the average person swallows at least 8 spiders each night in his sleep. WHERE would all these spiders be coming from in the first place. I don’t see 8 spiders IN my bed all day long, let alone a sufficient quality to account for swallowing only 8 of them that just happened to get too close to my mouth. I think all of these “factoids” are along the line of “Gullible does not appear in the dictionary,” just to see how many gullible people will go look it up.
I thought it was 8 spiders a year, but you probably don’t swallow that many in your life, since after all, spiders aren’t going to just walk into your mouth (cracked.com, plus other such myths).
I think most people missed the point of the “folding paper 7 times”, what with ultra thin drop cloths and football field size paper. I heard this in school, and it was “a sheet of paper”, meaning out of an ordinary notebook that any school child would have. So you tear out a sheet of paper and attempt it, and sure enough when you get to 6 or 7 the paper becomes too thick to continue folding.
Mythbusters and, dare I say it, Uncle Cecil missed the point on this one.
I was looking at something my mom had posted on her facebook page earlier, it said that no piece of paper could be folded in half, more than 7 times.
When I read that, I thought… that’s not even true and I immediately calculated in my mind exactly how I could fold a regular size notebook sheet of paper in half 8 times. I took a sheet of loose leaf paper… and I did exactly that in less than one minute.
Here’s HOW: using 8 1/2" x 11" 8 folds in half:
#1) Take the paper long ways and fold it in half so that it is now 4 1/4" x 11" approx
#2) Fold it in half again long ways so that it is 2 1/8" x 11" approx
#3) Fold it in half again long ways so that it is 1 1/16 x 11" approx
#4) Fold it in half again long ways so that it is 17/32" x 11" approx
#5) and fold it for the fifth time, in half, long ways so that it is now approx 1/4" x 11"
that is FIVE total folds in half so far… now we will fold it in half the last three times going the other way
#6) fold it in half by the length so that it is now approx 1/4" x 5 1/2"
#7) fold it in half by the length so that it is now approx 1/4" x 2 1/4 and getting very hard to fold… but we can make one more…
#8) fold it in half again by the length so that it is now approx 1/4" x 1 1/8 and now too thick to fold again… i think…
all measurements are approximate because the thickness of the paper takes away and it not accounted for in my measurements… I used those numbers so as not to confuse anyone on which directions the folds are going…
it is just simple folds… in half… 8 times with a regular notebook sheet paper.
Whenever I heard this myth, I would always pipe up “Sure you could, if the paper were big enough”, whereupon I was always told “Nuh-uh, it’s impossible, no matter how big it is!”.
I used to work in a pressroom–newsprint, web, ginormous rolls of paper. Finding a big enough piece of paper is not a problem. Getting it to crease into a fold after 5 or 6 folds (when it’s 32 and 64 thicknesses, respectively) is the problem. Go to a newspaper print shop, fish around their dumpster for a butt roll, and try it yourself. Or, buy a magazine on the order of Vogue and try to fold it in half, making a crease on the outer fold (No one disputes the inner fold will crease). This is far from impossibly theoretical.
The material property differences of paper vs plastic isn’t really critical. Cecil proposed a material that could reasonably be obtained in large dimensions with a thin cross section. This allowed demonstration of the principle that a sufficiently large size could be folded. If paper cannot be made .4 mil thick, then upscale the area to the thickness that can be achieved.
That column was written in 1991, long before Mythbusters, so Cecil couldn’t have cited them unless he had a time machine.
The typical claim is not limited to a regular sheet of notebook paper, but rather extended to any piece of paper, no matter the size. Thus, Mythbusters and Cecil address that claim by extending the size of the paper to ludicrous extremes and thus demonstrate the claim is false.
Okay, that is a new interpretation. You are sayingthat the definition of “fold” requires that all layers must be “creased”? Where is that provided in the original statement regarding paper?
I suppose by that definition you are correct, as the intervening layers are thick enough that the outer layers are wrapped in a gentle curve rather than creased.
I know if that’s a good enough escape. Even the deepest, innermost, most heavily creased internal fold edge (from the first hold) is a gentle curve if you zoom in enough. Unless you’re creasing that first fold into a single-molecule razor edge, it’s a curved fold at some scale. So there’s no compelling definition of “creased” that can be applied consistently.
My point: Conditions added to invalidate the actual successful demonstrations of folding a sheet of material more than seven times seem a bit of “no true Scotsman” to me. (“That didn’t count because… <arbitrary condition not even implied in the original challenge>”)
ETA: if the outer layers being insufficiently creased disqualifies a folding attempt, I can’t imagine even the postulated seven folds would be possible. My limited experience is that you get discernable “gentle curve” folds after about five folds.
Yeah, ok. I don’t feel bad at all now about answering the Chicago based Packers fan question about catching televised Packers’ games in Chicago, by telling him where to catch Bears’ games.
The question specifically was about paper, and Cecil says, “Huh, huh, I folded plastic more times than that! Enjoy the Bears’ game Sunday, on CH. 32 in Chi-towen!”
The original claim goes to a presumed geometrical limit that the continued doubling makes it impossible to fold. Ergo, Cecil addressed the inherent claim - that there is no size that could make it possible. He thus chose a material that was readily available that could be extra large and extra thin, to exaggerate the same geometrical principles.
He could have used regular thickness paper, and obtained a sheet a mile on a side. That would have been impractical and difficult to obtain. Ergo, he substituted, without violating the spirit of the claim, namely that size is irrelevant.
Unless you are somehow proposing that the nature of paper is a part of the essence of the question? IIRC the claim proposed was it was a size limitation, not a materials limitation.
Or is the nature of the question supposed to relate to strength to execute the fold? Paper, having a different stiffness than plastic and a different stress/strain relationship, would behave differently. I can see that would make the material significant. But I don’t recall the original claim relying on material properties.
