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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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 ua-cam.com/users/curiosityshow Why not subscribe?
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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..."
Its less and less about size and thickness progressively, and more about the shear and friction force in the already folded sheet. For making most folds, the paper has to be infinitely thin, smooth, stretchable or malleable, large, and waightless.
1st fold=2 layers, 2nd fold=4 layers, 3rd fold=8 layers, 4th=16, 5th=32, 6th=64, 7th=128, 8th=256, 9th=512... still think it is not so much about the thickness of it? 10th fold=1024 layers, 11th=2048... 15th=16 384... 18th=131 108... 20th=524 432. 21st fold=1 048 864. Twenty one folds and you have over one million of layers! So, feel free to claim it is about the thickness next time you come around this subject. Exponential growth turns to monster really quick.
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.
When they said how far the Moon was from the Earth, were they talking surface-to-surface, or centre-to-center? When talking about small objects, like how far two people are from each other, or how far apart two coins are from each other on a table, we always measure surface-to-surface. But how big does an object have to be before we switch the basis of the measurement? When people talk about how far Baltimore is from Washington D.C., is it from center-to-center or edge-to-edge?
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
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.
You can actually see he says it’s his fourth gold after the dog but it’s actually his 5th if you look at the size of the paper so he did in fact get 10 folds in
@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!
Mythbusther actually did it, but then, their paper was as large as an american football field and needed a forklift to move it at the end and was like 6 feet thick (standard thickness newsprint was used and taped together to make the sheet of paper)
Crazy episode. This page prompted me to rewatch it. They got 11 folds, and it took a football size piece of paper, a steam roller, and a forklift to complete it.
If you notice, the foldability increases with paper size and thinness. If you had a giant sheet of very thin paper, yes you could get to 10 and beyond.
if i were to turn back in time, around when i was 7 or 8 years old (assuming there were voice dubs in my native language), this would be my go to show in any circumstances
Using 384,000 km to moon and 0.01 mm thickness paper takes folding in half 45 times not 48 as stated in the video. The stated distance to the moon is correct. Therefore thickness of paper is incorrect. Back calculating for 48 folds yields paper thickness of 0.001 mm. Since the thinnest paper I could find currently is custom made and 0.02 mm thick, the video is using way incorrect paper dimensions.
Mythbusters did this one too. In the extreme version they used a piece of paper the size of a football field and with help of a forklift and steamroller were able to complete 11 folds
Ah. Yes. Go look at "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da-Vinci. It depicts 13 chaps (or possibly 12 chaps and once lass) sitting at a very long table, grabbing for the last few bread-rolls and having some sort dramatic conversation. By careful observation and calculation, I’ve decided his table is 4.650 metres long (15′ 4″), and the tablecloth is even longer. It's one length. Linen, probably. (The scene is set in the times it was painted in.) And it has quite obviously been folded away prior to use. The fold-pattern is quite distinct, and unwaveringly accurate. Da Vinci really nailed it. There are 17 fold-lines lengthwise, and by my estimation 8 or 9 cross-ways. Thus the single piece of fabric was folded into a bundle upwards of, if not MORE THAN, 128 layers thick! My estimate of 128 layers is based as follows: LENGTH-WAYS: 1st fold gives 2 layers (cloth block now about 3m long) / 2nd fold gives 4 layers (cloth block now 1.5m long) / 3rd fold gives 8 layers (cloth block now .75 long) / 4th fold gives 16 layers (cloth block now 300 to 400mm long) [note that this estimate does not match the observed cloth - which shows 17 foldlines, not 15 as it would get in my simplification] Now: WIDTH-WAYS: 1st fold doubles that to 32 layers / 2nd fold doubles again to 64 layers / 3rd fold to a final of 128 layers thick. MINIMUM! And as this video demonstrates - if you fold anything that often you’ll soon discover that it’s damn-near impossible. But if you do succeed - the fold-lines become progressively less distinct, and spread wider. But Leonardo’s fold-lines are *completely consistent*. (I’ve measured them) HE HAS DEPICTED AN IMPOSSIBLE TABLE-CLOTH! I have found no other discussion of this detail anywhere on the internet, which astonishes me. Are art-historians that unobservant?
That is interesting. I suspect there is a lot of hidden stuff in Leonardo's work. Have a look at my segment ua-cam.com/video/w3JFKYXRWDY/v-deo.html and I haven't heard anyone else commenbt on this left-right tesselation in Mona Lisa - Rob
tbf the wording of the first challenge allows it to just unfold and fold it 10 times, which would make it more accurate considering the wording "fold it like that"
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
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.
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.
"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...
The more you fould a paper in half, the more you realize paper is just very thin wood.
- Mr Myagi
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.
This explains the disastrous Australian moon mission in 1973.
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 ua-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.
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.
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 want to go back in time and tell these guys how much I enjoyed watching the show on my smart phone.
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
The best show from Australia that I watched in the 90s on Austria
I love how these videos are starting to get UA-cam recommended again. Even though the videos are short and sciencey.
This was like the best show ever as a kid. I'm now 50 and just found this.
MythBusters did this one with a thin piece of paper somewhat the size of a football field, and road rollers. They got past 11.
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!
@@gargaduk 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.
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!
I don't know how or why this ended up in my recommended videos, but thank you, Algorithm!
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 hope these guys are still sitting around somewhere nerding out.
Thanks, we are - Rob
@@CuriosityShow Awesome!!!!
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
This makes me weirdly nostalgic for that Australian childhood I never lived because I grew up in California.
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 ua-cam.com/users/curiosityshow Why not subscribe?
Damn... at the start I honestly thought that dog was a pig!
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.
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
FINALLY,
An easy solution for travelling to moon
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
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
actually, to be able to land on the moon, a large paper is more effective than a rocket ship
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.
It's actually a magic show with the magician pulling out any type of paper asked for. Bravo.
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.
These shows were the internet of the time! And they were glorious!!!!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
i dont know why i was recommended this or why i watched it all the way through but i loved every bit of it
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
ua-cam.com/video/65Qzc3_NtGs/v-deo.html
Here's 10+ folds. Friends and fork lift assisted.
these shows teach children so much. so why aren't they shown anymore?
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 !
How many times would you have to fold the paper before it collapsed in and formed a black hole?
This is actually Australia’s best scientific minds
They're still working on it today...
I watched this original episode when I was a kid and was amazed. Never forgot it.
What a show this was! Engaging intelligent and always intriguing! Don't make em like that anymore!
Its less and less about size and thickness progressively, and more about the shear and friction force in the already folded sheet. For making most folds, the paper has to be infinitely thin, smooth, stretchable or malleable, large, and waightless.
1st fold=2 layers, 2nd fold=4 layers, 3rd fold=8 layers, 4th=16, 5th=32, 6th=64, 7th=128, 8th=256, 9th=512... still think it is not so much about the thickness of it? 10th fold=1024 layers, 11th=2048... 15th=16 384... 18th=131 108... 20th=524 432. 21st fold=1 048 864. Twenty one folds and you have over one million of layers! So, feel free to claim it is about the thickness next time you come around this subject. Exponential growth turns to monster really quick.
i remember the conclusion always and think how amazing it is
I love this channel, it's so wholesome
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
I remember hearing somewhere that no mater how large the paper was you could not fold it over 7 times.
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!
When they said how far the Moon was from the Earth, were they talking surface-to-surface, or centre-to-center? When talking about small objects, like how far two people are from each other, or how far apart two coins are from each other on a table, we always measure surface-to-surface. But how big does an object have to be before we switch the basis of the measurement? When people talk about how far Baltimore is from Washington D.C., is it from center-to-center or edge-to-edge?
Was that your dog Deane or Rob??
Neither. I suspect it belonged to our producer of the time, Ian, who had two boxers - Rob
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 ua-cam.com/video/wtbcaWnybzs/v-deo.html
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 managed this but it took all sorts of heavy machinery to do it. edit: ua-cam.com/video/kRAEBbotuIE/v-deo.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 ua-cam.com/video/kRAEBbotuIE/v-deo.html they did it to 11.
this video has saved many lives.
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.
"We'll see you next week, goodbye"
*They did not see me the next week*
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.
You can actually see he says it’s his fourth gold after the dog but it’s actually his 5th if you look at the size of the paper so he did in fact get 10 folds in
His fourth GOLD after the DOG? Wtf are you on about, mate?
Can someone send me money so I can try?
Give your address. I'm sending you a coin!
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 would of folded it once then
Unfolded it and repeated That
Nine More Times.
I folded it ten times ✌🥺👌
love the transition with the dog! so cute
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!
I was talking about folding paper just 10 minutes ago and now this got recommended out of the blue.
back when you had cool shows to learn from not
"tommy has two mommies" or "suzy thinks she's a boy"
Mythbusther actually did it, but then, their paper was as large as an american football field and needed a forklift to move it at the end and was like 6 feet thick (standard thickness newsprint was used and taped together to make the sheet of paper)
"If you can cover the whole world with your arms, then your arms will be extremely huge and long".
It's not only doubling in thickness, it's halving in size. A thin enough piece of paper that's large enough would work fine
If you have a piece of large enough paper, you can. Actually Mythbusters already demonstrated it by folding a gigantic piece of paper 12 times.
Crazy episode. This page prompted me to rewatch it. They got 11 folds, and it took a football size piece of paper, a steam roller, and a forklift to complete it.
Is it impossible to do then? Even with a huge peice of thin paper?
Not sure if this show ran in the US when I was a kid but I don’t think I had the right channel anyways. Too bad I would’ve like watching it.
55… & you went Beyond The Sun ☀️ 🌌 🌎 30 Million Kilometers Beyond… this is Unbelievable οκ
If you notice, the foldability increases with paper size and thinness. If you had a giant sheet of very thin paper, yes you could get to 10 and beyond.
No you couldn't
@@raysmith6891 Yes you could. Imagine tissue paper one square mile in size. If that helps you.
if i were to turn back in time, around when i was 7 or 8 years old (assuming there were voice dubs in my native language), this would be my go to show in any circumstances
Does playdough count as paper? Because I fold playdough at night after the orderlies lockdown the fun house. 🏡
Using 384,000 km to moon and 0.01 mm thickness paper takes folding in half 45 times not 48 as stated in the video. The stated distance to the moon is correct. Therefore thickness of paper is incorrect. Back calculating for 48 folds yields paper thickness of 0.001 mm. Since the thinnest paper I could find currently is custom made and 0.02 mm thick, the video is using way incorrect paper dimensions.
Ahhhhh holy crappers... I used to watch their show every afternoon when I was a kid.
What a great show this was back in the day 🤙
Mythbusters did this one too. In the extreme version they used a piece of paper the size of a football field and with help of a forklift and steamroller were able to complete 11 folds
Ah. Yes.
Go look at "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da-Vinci. It depicts 13 chaps (or possibly 12 chaps and once lass) sitting at a very long table, grabbing for the last few bread-rolls and having some sort dramatic conversation. By careful observation and calculation, I’ve decided his table is 4.650 metres long (15′ 4″), and the tablecloth is even longer. It's one length. Linen, probably. (The scene is set in the times it was painted in.) And it has quite obviously been folded away prior to use. The fold-pattern is quite distinct, and unwaveringly accurate. Da Vinci really nailed it. There are 17 fold-lines lengthwise, and by my estimation 8 or 9 cross-ways.
Thus the single piece of fabric was folded into a bundle upwards of, if not MORE THAN, 128 layers thick!
My estimate of 128 layers is based as follows:
LENGTH-WAYS:
1st fold gives 2 layers (cloth block now about 3m long) / 2nd fold gives 4 layers (cloth block now 1.5m long) / 3rd fold gives 8 layers (cloth block now .75 long) /
4th fold gives 16 layers (cloth block now 300 to 400mm long)
[note that this estimate does not match the observed cloth - which shows 17 foldlines, not 15 as it would get in my simplification]
Now: WIDTH-WAYS:
1st fold doubles that to 32 layers / 2nd fold doubles again to 64 layers / 3rd fold to a final of 128 layers thick. MINIMUM!
And as this video demonstrates - if you fold anything that often you’ll soon discover that it’s damn-near impossible. But if you do succeed - the fold-lines become progressively less distinct, and spread wider.
But Leonardo’s fold-lines are *completely consistent*. (I’ve measured them)
HE HAS DEPICTED AN IMPOSSIBLE TABLE-CLOTH!
I have found no other discussion of this detail anywhere on the internet, which astonishes me. Are art-historians that unobservant?
I, too, need a hobby.
That is interesting. I suspect there is a lot of hidden stuff in Leonardo's work. Have a look at my segment ua-cam.com/video/w3JFKYXRWDY/v-deo.html and I haven't heard anyone else commenbt on this left-right tesselation in Mona Lisa - Rob
The Hydraulic Press Channel tried this and it exploded. It pushed the channel to stardom.
I knew it was a dog straight away,
I'm too clever for this programme
G'day Bruce. How many Bruces would it take standing on each others shoulders to reach the moon? Yours sincerely Sheila.
These 2 guys are now sitting around trying to figure out how to cut the bottom third off a blanket and place it on the top to make the blanket longer.
They should do more of this - that’s more education that the BS on TV now lol
tbf the wording of the first challenge allows it to just unfold and fold it 10 times, which would make it more accurate considering the wording "fold it like that"
Can it be done with aluminum foil?