No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times

Unknown expriation date < all time.

As far as a normal piece of paper goes this is true.

MythBusters sort of beat this one, if you count the fact that they started off with a "piece" of paper the size of a football field....well it was big. I also know of an experiment where they used very thin plastic sheeting and also got in more than seven folds.

Does plastic sheeting count as paper? I have only normal paper and even so have no intent to start folding any to test the idea.

I don't consider the plastic test to be the same either.....that was done by a well known "smart guy", and I won't mention his name, sometimes he does things like that.

There is a way to fold a regular piece of paper 8 times, they did it on that episode of MB, but I don't remember exactly what he did.

As far as folding in half, again and again....7 is the limit.

I've always wondered if you could do better with an old large bible, the paper in some of those are very thin, like rice paper, if I ever run across one that's trashed I'll rip out a page or two and try it.

I had a copy of War and Peace that had that paper. Don't know how I let it get away.

Have you considered 3 ply toilet paper as an alternative?

I have not personally attempted to test the idea. I can see where special paper, such as the stuff in the video, could be used to thwart the saying. However, for ordinary paper, I am relatively certain the statement holds true.

The myth was busted Edgar.

It wasn't special paper, it was just really big. But as the title of the thread says, the myth is that no piece of paper can be folded more than 7 times.

This is clearly untrue.

Mythbusters is cool.

Apparently, Britney Gallivan, during her junior year in high school, came up with a mathematical model for the limits for square piece of paper, and used this knowledge to fold a large piece of paper twelve times in January 2002.

Equation

Variables in the equation determining the number of folds possible for a square piece of paper are width, and thickness which makes perfect sense.



So what you say is true if "paper" is defined to be "standard piece of copy paper."

i before e except -

I actually found one of those pieces of paper I was talking about...or close enough anyway.....while I was going thru some old files, the clerk said it was called "onion paper". Alas, seven folds was all I could get, but it was easier to fold....very thin stuff....a slight step above tracing paper.

EDIT: Onionskin, not onion paper.

That jogged my memory. I used to know about that.