Really though, for a column that prides itself on being accurate, how is it accurate to republish a column that is no longer accurate? It reaches a point where the fact that the column was accurate some very long time ago is a bit of a lame excuse.
What part of the column are you claiming is inaccurate?
The classic columns are run to enjoy the wit of Cecil’s past. That, and to keep activity on the main page daily rather than just once a week.
In this column here:
… Cecil claims to have debunked the claim that a piece of paper, no matter how large, cannot be folded in half more than seven times, and did so utilizing a micro-thin sheet of plastic.
I call shenanigans. The claim specifies “sheet of paper”, not “sheet of any flat material”.
While I would certainly be interested in comments from somebody with more expertise than I possess, I would suspect that the difficulty in folding a sheet of paper in half more than seven times is rooted in the paper’s fibrous nature, as well as friction caused by paper’s ultimately non-smooth surfaces. Each fold requires breaking and/or bending more and more layers of paper fibers. Additionally, each fold adds more layers of paper grabbing onto each other to resist the folding attempts. Both of these are qualities that plastic lacks, being more an amorphous and inherently slippery substance.
One problem is the thickness of the paper. The radius of the bend increases to the point where the paper can’t be compressed or stretched enough for the fold on both the top and bottom surface.
Mythbusters attacked this issue. I don’t remember if it was from that show, but I remember something where it could be done with a roll of toilet paper, which is more compressible than something like writing paper, and long enough to get some leverage on the paper after the 7th fold.
There’s also no clear definition of what ‘folded paper’ is. How much slip, crumbling, stretching, tearing, compression of the paper is allowed? Should the folded paper have the qualities of cardboard? I doubt anyone be surprised to find that 128 ply cardboard is difficult to fold? And what if the paper was wet?
I agree with TriPolar about the specifics of the myth itself - without specifics as to what constitutes ‘paper’ and ‘fold’ it’s a hard nut to crack. The myth seems to have originated from the fact that, while 7 seems such a small number of folds, the number of layers are growing exponentially. So you could posit the whole “seven folds” idea to any normal person (with access to normal paper) and supposedly “prove” it correct when they fail to fold a sheet of paper from a notebook more than seven times. They’re bound to try - who can’t do something so simple only seven times?
However, when Mythbusters disproved this myth, they used what is fairly irrefutably a sheet of paper, and it would also be hard to argue the fact that each fold they made would in fact be a fold, regardless of definitions. Just a huge sheet of paper folded in half over seven times:
There was a thread about this just last week or so.
In any case, I just folded an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper 8 times. You don’t need special paper. It would have been a lot easier with an 11x17.
I folded it lengthwise 5 times, then doubled the resulting thin strip 3 times.
Moderator note: I’ve merged the two threads. This causes a slight hiccup in the fabric of space-time. The last post of the prior thread was Irishman’s, #23 in the sequence, dated Nov 7. The first post of the new discussion is Mister Rik’s from Nov 29.
Oops, sorry. I thought I was looking at the most-recently-posted Cecil column, checked the first page of the forum and it appeared nobody had started a thread yet.
The way I first heard the claim, back in school and many many years before the Internet, it didn’t actually say “of any size”, but rather, “even a sheet as large as a double-newspaper page”. Looking back, I suspect the source I read/heard it from was aiming it at the largest sheet of paper the average school kid would have access to.