Fold me to the Moon
Sometimes I buy my dinner at a MOS Burger near my house. This is a recent MOS Burger receipt. Every time I go there, I fiddle with the paper receipt while I wait for my order. I fold it and unfold it and fold it some more. What I’m doing is trying to visualize the saying that you only need to fold a paper 42 or so times in order to make it thick enough to reach the Moon.
Is it a myth? Maybe. The pro argument is that if we assume that a sheet of paper is 0.1 millimeters thick, then we can calculate the height of each fold. After one fold, the paper is 0.2 millimeters thick, after two folds it is 0.4 millimeters thick, and so on. By the 42nd fold, the paper is 439,804,000,000 millimeters high, or 439,804 kilometers, which is more than enough to reach the Moon, which is approximately 384,400 kilometers distant from the Earth.
I cannot fold the paper more than six times, and that sixth fold is difficult. It’s not neat and clean. While doing it I try to visualize the rate its thickness is increasing - how many folds would it take to reach from here to the edge of the table? for instance - and what it would take to fold it a seventh time. Maybe what it takes to fold it a seventh time is just a bigger piece of paper. I could get a bigger piece of paper and try it out, but ... nah.
I will continue my periodic research.