What is the height of a normal piece of paper folded in half fifty times?

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Answer

Normal paper is referred to as "16-weight" which is .0032 inches thick. To figure out how thick it would be after fifty folds, you have to know how many layers there would be and multiply that number times .0032

After 1 fold you would have 2 layers, after 2 folds, 4, after 3 folds, 8 etc. In other words you would end up with 2 raised to the 50th power folds. That's 2 times itself 50 times. That's a big number. In fact it comes to a whopping 1125899906842627 layers!!!

Multiply that times .0032 and you find out that the paper would now be 3602879701896.397 inches thick!! Mind you that's not counting the air trapped between layers.

[Interesting to know, though, is that it has been proven that no matter how big a sheet of paper is (length times width) you can only fold it up to 7 times, unless you use a sheet thats the size of a ware house and have five hours and a C.A.T Roller to flatten the paper, in which case you can get up to 11. But under human strength can you only get it to 7, which would make the paper 0032 x 2^7 or 0.4096 inches thick. Quite a difference.]

P.S. The world record is 12 times

wjs1632

Or you could try the correct answer. No matter how many times you fold it, a standard sheet of paper is always 11" tall.

Addition

Just for the record in the UK and probably across Europe the standard size of paper closest to "letter" in the US is called A4 (about 11.7" high). We used to have a size called foolscap (pronounced fullscap) which was even higher but hasn't been seen in offices for a good while.

First answer by Wjs1632. Last edit by Qman1. Contributor trust: 12 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 35 [recommend question]

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