I’ve got a sheet of notebook paper that I folded in half 8 times. It’s only about 3/4 inches tall.
This morning I was able to fold a single ply of tissue paper (kleenex) 10 times. It was about 3/4 " thick.
It told her how big the paper had to be, before she started.
And as the link points out, it’s not a matter of strength. If you take a paper that’s too small to start with, and put it under a hydraulic diamond press for the last steps, it might rip apart, but it won’t fold.
Personally, by the way, I have no objection to her standard of “folding”. Any attempt at a stricter definition will end up implying that you can’t fold a piece of paper in half twice, since the outer layer will be “bending” around the middle layers, not “folding”.
Math student: I’ll never reach her.
Eng Srudent: Yeah, but I’ll get close enough
Seems like the main problem is that half way through you need extra paper for the later curves but there is no place to “store” it.
It’s pretty obvious that you could have the end result of as many folds as you wanted, but the problem is that during the actual folding there would be huge bulges in the work.
For example, if you wanted to do 15 folds, you would create an end-wise drawing like in tis picture http://pomonahistorical.org/FoldDiagramBCG.gif.
Put pegs into a wall at all the turn points.
Then just start threading the paper following the lines, like feeding the film into an old 8mm projector.
Once it was in place, you might fool some people right there. If they demanded proof of folding, you might think that you could simply grab the finished pile, start unfolding for the camera, and then run the tape backward.
But what you would find is that at the first step of unfolding you would have huge bulges on each half. Unfolding them would create impossible convolutions, and at that stage it would be clear that your process would bind up and block its own undoing.